


im coming back from the dead and im taking you home with me

by gottabewhatomorrowneeds



Series: i’ll give you all the nails you need [8]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dubious Morality, Fate & Destiny, Implied/Referenced Torture, Other, Temporary Character Death, no beta we die like the fab four
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26591491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gottabewhatomorrowneeds/pseuds/gottabewhatomorrowneeds
Summary: The Phoenix Witch falls in love, knowing damn well this love story can only end in tragedy. The Fabulous Killjoys have a destiny to fulfill, and She must not stop them, or She risks ruining the future the Girl is meant to create.She can’t stop the inevitable.Right?
Relationships: Party Poison (Danger Days)/Phoenix Witch (Fabulous Killjoys)
Series: i’ll give you all the nails you need [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622683
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	im coming back from the dead and im taking you home with me

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags, guys

They’re entangled in each other’s arms again.

It’s not bad, to lie within the arms of a loved one. She’s becoming more and more used to the warmblooded body lying within Her grasp, sound asleep, completely and utterly trusting Her with this vulnerable position of unconsciousness.

They’re on the couch of the diner, just like always. Kobra Kid and Jet Star are out on a supply run and Fun Ghoul and the Girl have decided to try and hassle Tommy Chow Mein, wanting to see how many times they can get kicked out of his store in one day. It’s barely even the afternoon, and yet Her lover’s friends are already spread thin like the leaves of a tree in the midst of fall. They’re a lively little bunch, a perfect match for Her rowdy lover.

Party Poison shifts next to Her. She claws Her fingers through their bright red hair, idly untangling as much as She can without stirring them from the rest they desperately need. She’s the goddess of death, though Her divinity allows Her a few miracles, a few little parlor tricks She’s learned over the years with Her magic. Party Poison’s hair doesn’t quite fade into its natural brown as much as it used to.

She sees their roots coming in, though. She might offer to dye their hair again. She’s only done it once, but their hair was the most vibrant red they’d ever had. She thinks She can do it well, if they’ll let Her. It’s a personal thing, though, so She won’t push.

Poison stirs a bit, and She keeps Her hands in their hair, trying to soothe them. She knows they’re dreaming about the clap on Route Guano- Jet Star and Kobra Kid were only recently found alive, about two months ago. Fun Ghoul, Poison, and the Girl are all still a bit rattled at the month-long disappearance Kobra and Jet decided to take.

It was the only time in all the years they’ve known each other did Poison ever doubt Her, and She certainly doesn’t blame them.

“What time is it?”

It’s dry and a bit slurred. Poison blinks up at Her with those wide eyes, a small, sleepy smile stretched across their face. Every genuine expression of love always slaps Her right in the face; She’s still trying to get used to this, even if it’s been five years.

She brushes the bangs out of their face. “Oh, it’s about eleven o’clock.”

Poison laughs. It’s tired and it nearly cracks, and She’s heard it a thousand times, and She’d do anything to hear it a thousand more. It’s a beautiful sound. “Man, I thought birds like you were supposed to wake up early.”

“I do.” She snuggles into them a bit, wrapping Her arms around their waist again. Poison happily leans back into Her embrace. “But I figured you deserved a few more hours of rest. You know I don’t need to sleep.”

“But it feels nice, doesn’t it? To do things you don’t have to do?”

It’s deeper than what they mean, than what their tone inflicts. She knows what they truly mean, though- She’s long ago learned to read between lines. “Always. And that’s why I let you sleep in.”

“You’re too good for me.” Poison yawns, quietly. “I guess that means everyone is still out of the house.”

“They shouldn’t be back for a while.”

“Since it’s just the two of us…” Poison gives Her a devilish grin and moves closer towards Her, their lips inches apart as they swing their arms over Her shoulders. “You know, we could really have some quality time together.”

“You are not subtle, honey.”

“Subtlety was never my forte. You remember all those flirtatious advancements I made, even back when I first met you. I’m an open book.”

“Perhaps…” She cards Her fingers through their hair again, gently. Poison leans into Her touch. “Or perhaps you’re just easy for me to read because we know each other so well.”

“Then you know what I’m going to do next?”

“I think I’m going to beat you to it.”

The Witch moves forward, closing the distance between them. It’s a soft kiss, gentle and loving, not desperate and deep like they had first been. It’s a bit more chaste, a bit more loving. Poison smiles against Her lips, and it’s a feeling She hopes to never be without.

She leans away from them, a pretend frown twisting Her lips. Poison laughs again, like music to a sweet melody, a lullaby to sate Her unease. “Now, I know that look isn’t because I’m a bad kisser.”

“No, but your mouth is rank.” She playfully shoves their head away from Her. “Go brush your teeth, and then we can try again.”

Poison begins to sit up, and the Witch always forgets how much She adores the heat of having them by Her side until it’s gone. “Blah, blah, blah. Fine, but when I get back, I’m hoping we can do some more fun things then just kiss.”

“Like what?”

“I’m gonna paint your nails.” They wink at Her. “Just some girl time between us. I think we deserve a day of pure, unadulterated relaxation.”

She smiles at them. “If I could give you that for the rest of your life, I would.”

Poison’s expression softens. “There’s not a burden I wouldn’t carry if only to meet you again.”

“You’re such a sap, you spend too much time with Cherri, spouting poetry.” She tosses a pillow at them. “Now go on, go brush your teeth so we can have some fun.”

“As you wish.”

-

It’s a quaint little life, one the Phoenix Witch never would have imagined for Herself even ten years ago.

She was a storyteller. Every life that shall live and has lived within the small land of Battery City and its surrounding zones has a plot lined out for them. Every person is the central character in their own book, and She dutifully writes down what She deems important to each person’s story. What obstacles they’ll face, the triumphs, the failures, the love, the heartbreak- She writes what’s integral to the story.

She has a set beginning and end. She knows how every person in this small section of the earth shall die, how their bones shall become one with the sand, how their flesh shall turn to dust, then to fertilizer. She knows what will happen, the end result. She wrote it all Herself. Hell, She even knows when the last believer in Her will breathe their last breath, knows the date She Herself shall climb through the gates of the afterlife when Her legacy has been long forgotten.

But there are things within this world even She can not predict. And the Witch only sees the important parts of history, only sees the big picture events. She sees the important events, milestones, and others- it’s the little things in life that She can not predict.

There are so many outliers, so many probabilities to small events that may seem insignificant but can become big problems should Lady Fate decide to test Her patience. Even mere seconds within someone's life can be the start of something new and unforeseen. All it takes is seconds to save someone's life, seconds for a bomb to explode, seconds for a life to crumble.

The Witch sees what’s probable. She sees outcomes that are most likely to occur. 

But Fate is ever changing. Destiny isn’t written in stone- it’s written in Her blood, on a piece of paper, with a single crow feather. Ink can fade, pages can be torn, and books can fray. Things change.

So the Witch doesn’t get to see the entire story. Things happen, unaccording to Her writing, and She may do Her best to correct the mistakes within the timeline, but some things are out of Her hands, such as the red string of fate.

However, death is not.

And that is how She meets Party Poison years before they are due to march into Battery City, before they meet their brothers for the first time, before their hair is as red as the fires of their wrath, before their name is even Party Poison. They’re only eighteen, fresh out of Battery City, having spent days and nights running as fast as they can to escape the claws of the corporation and the blood that stains their hands.

She meets them on the side of Route Guano, looking every bit of the roadkill they were when She grabs hold of their soul, unmarred by a mask, unanchored and easy to attain. They’re blistered by the sun's unforgiving rays, fried with the blaster shots from the Drac patrol that chased them, bleeding out from the gun shots that litter their body, and freezing from the merciless chill of the night they had died in.

They meet, and it's cordial, mechanical, as all meetings with those who’ve experienced an unlucky cross with Her are. But Poison works their charms even when they’re still trying to process the fact that magic exists, even when they’re only on the cusp of figuring out who they are, even when they haven’t figured out their name besides the gendered, hideous one syllable name they had been given in the city.

She continues to meet them, over and over, as if Lady Fate Herself decided to weave their strings of fate together into a tapestry. Over and over, Poison dies- in the heat of a battle from a well-timed shot to a vital organ, from a knife fight at the local club that took a wrong turn, from a stupid cold that turned into something a bit deadlier, from too many days of no food or water, either because they were trapped in the desert without recourses or they willingly offered away what they had.

She meets them, over and over, over and over, throughout those five years. She’s practically right beside them every step faltered, every breath halted, every time they closed their eyes. She’s there for every milestone- She’s there the night Newsie and Hot Chimp find their body on the side of the road and practically adopt them as their little sibling, in the raid at Newsie and Hot Chimps club that introduces them to Show Pony and subsequently Dr. D and Cherri Cola, in the raid that introduces them to Jet Star and Kobra Kid a year later, in the marketplace where Ghoul tries to mug them, in the fight in Battery City that first time, four years ago, where they rescue a small child who will become the Saviour, though now she is the six year old Saviour To Be.

She’s there beside them every step, every death, everytime they act too reckless and land themselves in a new plane of reality. And She finds that the time they spend together continues to grow, every meeting, and the frequency in those meetings, and She finds Herself, despite everything, not annoyed by their antics.

She hates bringing back the dead. She loathes cleaning up the messes of those who die prematurely. But after a few meetings, She’s not actively loathing the inevitable death of the domino who will lead to the Girl’s succession. And perhaps She begins to view them as something more than a domino, and someone who is simply human, and not quite the character She had created.

She learns Party Poison isn’t fearless, isn’t brave, isn’t strategic, isn’t wise. They’re not the charming, perfect hero She had crafted for the desert to fall in love with before ultimately losing them. They’re kind and generous and self destructive and volatile and terrified of themself and terrified for others and witty and charming and vengeful and petty. They’re not a two-dimensional character She wrote with Her ink, they’re more than anything She could have ever imagined.

And, perhaps, She falls in love. 

And perhaps, Poison falls in love, too.

(Have they always been in love? Or did it have to build, crescendo, from the small actions of genuine love She had offered, as it did for Her? Or had She been in love this whole time, simply unable to diagnose a human feeling She hasn’t felt in years? She’ll never know, and that’s fine.)

-

She knows their fate.

It is a thought that plagues Her every moment they spend together and every moment they are apart. The simple matter is that She knows exactly how their torrid love shall end, knows exactly the day, hour, minutes, second, even milliseconds Her lover shall be wrenched out of Her grasp forever.

She knows how it will end, knew from the very start that this love would bring nothing but sorrow for either party. Yet She still took Poison’s hand that first day they kissed, She still kissed them back, She still offered Herself up as if their love could last for all of eternity.

She still lets Herself live in these domestic moments, where She sleeps in the couch against them, feeling the thrum of their heartbeat and knowing it’s a lullaby She won’t hear forever. In the moments on the battlefield where Poison offers Her a quiet prayer, moments where they meet at the mailbox shrine, moments where they dance to the bass of Mad Gear and the Missile Kid’s quieter songs, moments where She bathes in their laughter and listens to their peculiar stories.

She knows they are to end. Nothing gold can stay. Nothing good is ever meant to last, and if there is any proof of that in Her life, it is Party Poison.

She has cursed them, cursed them with a fate that She can not undo, a story that can not be erased or rewritten for it is written in the stars.

Party Poison must die.

That is fact.

Poison must die, must falter and be slain by the hand of their worst enemy, their previous commander. They must be shot right before the Girl’s eyes, right before Kobra Kid, who will move away from the group of Dracs he was keeping at bay to attack Korse, before ultimately getting shot multiple times. Ghoul and Jet and the Girl must get chased by the Dracs Kobra had been fending off, where Ghoul must shut the door behind them and sacrifice himself for their escape. And Jet must die, sprawled across the trans am, tasting that small inkling of freedom trying to protect the Girl and offer her cover moments before Hot Chimp and Show Pony arrive.

It must happen, in that order, in those exact details, or else Her entire future scheme She’s built up will wilt and unravel. All of the pages She’s written, all of the future stories, will be wrought into ash by one simple slip, one tentative mistake. A butterfly can cause a hurricane with wings as fragile as a spider’s web, and the events that may spark by the slightest misstep will be of no little consequence.

The Girl has a destiny to fulfill, a prophecy to fulfill. She must become the bomb, she must save the wicked souls trapped within Battery City, must save the beaten and the damned, the Dracs who have had their souls snatched, the citizens who live their lives in despair, the disheartened killjoys who have watched eras after eras of bright, idealistic killjoys be constantly slain before their eyes.

The Girl has to fulfill it, and she can not do it when she is constantly living in the shadows of her older siblings. There are choices she has to make, decisions she must enact, beliefs she must consider, and she can not do anything if the Fab Four is there to guide her into both the wrong and right decisions. This is her destiny, her legacy, her story- the Fabulous Killjoys are nothing but side characters, footnotes in the inevitable. Their death is the inciting event, not the climax.

The Girl must live without them. This is her life, and she will have to take control of it.

She can’t do that if Party Poison is there, teaching her how to charm those who oppose her. She can’t do that if Kobra Kid shows her how to keep her wits about her when her world crumbles. She can’t do that if Ghoul is there, teaching her how to be unpredictable and one step ahead of the enemy. She can’t do that if Jet is there, teaching her how to deceive others into underestimating her. She can’t take control if the Fab Four are there to coddle her and stifle her and protect her. 

She has to grow up. And the Witch hates that she has to do it so soon, but the people in this desert need her, the people in Battery City need her, the lost souls in this god forsaken world need her. Her mother needs her.

The Witch can not interfere with destiny, can not rewrite this story. The Girl is the main character, the Girl is the leader of a revolution that will succeed, the Girl is the bulletproof future and the Fabulous Killjoys are the secondary aftermath, the collateral necessary for the future the Witch has crafted.

The Four will bring war. The Girl will bring peace. And that key difference is why the Four must die.

The Witch tells Herself these facts every time She gets lost in Poison’s eyes, every time She hears them laugh, every time She wakes up with them in Her arms, every dance they perform together, every sunset meeting at the mailbox, every kiss they share, every moment She pretends that they have all of eternity together.

The Witch knows what She has to do.

That doesn’t make it any less harder.

-

It’s a Saturday afternoon, the only day of the week where the Witch has obligations outside of collecting souls and being entertained by Poison’s antics. 

Destroya, Cherri, and the Witch spend four hours bickering amongst each other on top of Destroya’s head. It starts friendly enough, but the three of them are so old, and have grown old together, that they have carved completely different ideals into themselves and now can not see eye to eye on much. They still make time for brunches together, of course, because they are still old friends no matter how much they change.

They used to invite Dr. D along, but the Witch and him hold too much tension to make themselves tolerable to be around.

(It is him who pushes the Fab Four into the suicide mission of rescuing the six year old Girl. If Dr. D so wanted, he could have convinced them to stay, to calm down, to plan a better plan then just “attack”. But he didn’t. Because the only thing Dr. D ever expected out of them was their eventual downfall. He only wanted to help them become martyrs, nothing more.

He lets them go after they resupply at the radio shack. Cherri will watch, idly by, but She knows the fate the Four will face eats away at him, too. He loves those kids just as much as She does.

Dr. D has no remorse, and certainly not for the dead. He wrote their obituaries before they had even met.)

So there they are one sunny afternoon. The Witch is obnoxiously slurping down a soda She conned from a devoutly religious killjoy. When people make small sacrifices for Her, She certainly doesn’t complain.

A can of Plus resides within Destroya’s mouth. She’s still not sure how much that machine can actually eat or drink considering it’s physical form has corroded so terribly, but Cherri and Her always bring a pack of it just in case.

Cherri is quietly drinking his coffee, clearly annoyed at the Witch’s antics. They’re old, old friends, older than Destroya, and they know exactly how to grate on each other's nerves. But that also means they know exactly what the other is going to do to try to get on their nerves.

Cherri Cola sighs. “So you and Poison are a real thing, huh?”

“Five years now, officially.”

“Cute.”

She holds Her head high. “They sure are.”

“You know what has to happen. Are you sure fraternizing with people who are already dead is all that great?”

“You don’t have to put yourself through this,” Destroya hums.

“I’m not putting myself through anything. I’m enjoying every minute.”

“And you’re counting down to the minute they die and you can’t bring them back.”

“I’m living in the moment, assholes.”

“You know what has to be done. You can’t afford to ignore what must be.”

“Hey, you hang out with them all the fucking time.” She huffs. “I don’t hear myself lecturing you about ignoring fate, and neither is Destroya.”

“That’s because I’m there to help them, not hinder them.”

“Hey!”

“I heal their wounds, I mend their skin and bones, I keep them fighting until their last fight.” Cherri sighs. “I’m the deity of life, and I keep them alive. But you’re meddling in this, doing more than kicking them out of the land of the dead. You’re becoming too attached, and I’m just worried that you’re going to lose sight of what’s important here.”

“You’re just as attached as I am! I might be in love, but so are you, even if platonically. They’re all your friends, they trust you and adore you wholeheartedly, and you know damn well you love them back.”

She shakes Her can at him. “I know you feel just as much sorrow as I do over their inevitable fate. And I know that you wish you could change it.”

“But we can’t,” Cherri stresses. “And I know you’re trying to figure out a way to do that!”

“They have to die! I know this already!”

“But you don’t, do you? You say you do, you say you understand the gravity of this situation, but you don’t. Because love is blinding you, it’s making you believe, or at least hope, in a future that can not exist.”

“I know what we have to do.” Her voice is small. She hates that Her voice is small.

He sips on his coffee, gazing across the hunk of metal they’re sitting on to watch Her with an expectant expression. She holds her soda can almost defensively, already knowing what will fall out of his lips before he can even speak. She can certainly feel Destroya’s silent judgement- the metal husk they’re sitting on may not be very vocal, but the energy waves it sends out certainly says all words may fail to send across.

“I wish there was another way,” Cherri admits, his voice fragile. “I don’t want them to die. They’re good people, a rarity in this god forsaken desert. Those who have survived half as much shit as them have become twisted in ways that can not be undone. But those kids are genuinely a light in the darkest era of BLi. But they have to die, or else we will never leave this dark age of corporate control.”

“It’s not fair,” She finally whispers, mostly to the air.

“No. It’s not.”

“But the Girl has a destiny.”

“She has to save us.”

“I know.”

Cherri sets down his mug. “I’m not trying to patronise you. You’ve been doing this thing since the Helium Wars began. You understand fate better than I. I just don’t want you to get hurt or do something rash.”

“Falling in love will kill you,” Destroya adds.

The Witch crushes the aluminium. “I won’t die for another one hundred and fifty years, eight months, three weeks, four days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes..”

“Perhaps not physically.”

“Whatever!” She crosses Her arms. “I know what has to be done.”

“Falling in love may kill you, but make sure it doesn’t kill anyone else.”

-

Party Poison is twenty when a cumulation of all their meetings finally crescendo into something more than usual, when they finally become something more than this bizarre relationship they’ve been fostering since they first escaped.

It’s sunset. The sky is orange and purple, like the blossoms of flowers long ago wiped from the face of California in the wake of the nuclear attacks from the Helium Wars. 

She’s centered on the outskirts of Death Valley, collecting mail from the local shrine. It’s routine, as always, to take the mail when the veil between the reality of the living and the dead frays. She crossed through easily, gathering the envelopes into Her claws, idly checking through the names of the deceased.

There’s a letter from Hot Chimp, a few Drac masks Cherri had blessed, a couple of joints She knows came from Ghoul, and a few other battered masks from killjoys She knew died in a clap a few hours earlier. It’s not much, though it rarely is. Too many people are already dead.

The crunching of sand is an alarm that warns Her that She is not alone.

Party Poison stands before Her. There’s a letter in their hand, hastily scrawled with a loopy, aesthetic signature. There’s a bright grin on their lips, something not quite cocky or smug, something almost genuine.

Their hair gleams in the dying sunlight, illuminating like the embers of a starving flame. It’s an inferno that captures Her attention like always, a red that demands the attention of everyone around Her. It seems She simply isn’t immune to their allure, She supposes.

(The urge to run Her fingers through it, to see if it will burn Her, has never felt so strong.)

“Hey, baby doll.” They blow Her a kiss and move right next to Her, with no regard for personal space. They lean against the mailbox languidly, watching Her like they have all the time in the world to waste and they want to do it with Her. “Quite the romantic scene, huh? Sunset, just the two of us...”

“Oh yes, very romantic.” She shakes the masks of the dead Dracs at Poison. “What’s next, a ritualistic sacrifice?”

“I’d get tied up on your altar any day, babe.” They wink at Her.

“Is the only reason you walked out all the way to this mailbox is to antagonise me?”

“Yes, and no. It’s the main reason.” Poison slips a letter into Her hand. “Jet has a letter that needed to be delivered, but he has a broken leg. I told him I'd deliver it.”

“How charitable of you,” She croons, plucking it from their fingers. Poison rubs their nose.

“Oh, you know me. I’m the epitome of saintliness.”

“Strangely enough, that doesn’t sound like you in the slightest.”

“You’re right. I’d be an angel. Those things are sexy and genderless.”

“You know, as much as I’d love to stay and chat, I do have other things to do.”

“Unfortunately for you, I don’t.”

The Witch sighs, watching Poison clamber on top of the mailbox. They sit with one leg bent and the other dangling haphazardly. At this height, they can finally see each other eye to eye.

“Is there anything specific on your mind?” She resigned Herself to this next hour of being at Poison’s side. She’s a deity of death, and She doesn’t have to stick around and listen to them. But She still does, because there’s something magnetic about them that She can’t shake no matter how hard She tries (and oh, does She try).

“As a matter of fact, yes. I was talking to Cherri the other day-” She groans, already not liking where this is going- “and he told me that you had once been human. That you still are human.”

“I’m a deity.”

“But you began as a human, like me.” Poison watches Her with eyes that seem to reflect Her own- ancient. “And I don’t fancy you as someone who’s completely detached from their humanity, like you want others to believe.”

“I am no human.” She lets out a quiet sigh. “I haven’t been for a long, long time.”

“I understand.” The worst part is, She knows that they do. It’s two different experiences they have, yet the outcome is the same- a strange detachment of their own humanity. Poison was a soldier, a mindless drone for years, taught that they were nothing more than a gun to be loaded or a grenade to be fired. The Witch has simply become corroded with time spent away from others like Her. “We’re a lot alike, aren’t we?”

“Birds of a feather flock together, hm?”

“Huh?”

“An old saying. Similar people stick together.”

Poison snorts. “And you made a bird joke. That’s my schtick.”

“Are we having a heart to heart or not?”

“No, we can continue.” Poison gazes at the sunset for a while, before glancing back at the Witch. “You really were human once, huh?”

“Before I died.”

The question they ask next isn’t the one She expects. Poison must be curious about how the deity of death managed to die. “What was your name?”

“You of all people know the power of a name.”

“And yet you know mine.” Poison watches Her, expectant. “You preach about order and balance, that life can not be saved or condemned without an equal counteract. So if you know something about me, and I don’t know that same fact about you, well.... Isn’t it fair for you to tell me?”

The Witch remains quiet for a while. It’s been a very long time since She’s even thought of Her past self, the one who wasn’t adorned in a feather cloak and a mask and had control over the very lives of all those within the desert. The simple human girl who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, who wandered through forests before they went extinct looking for frogs, who liked to mimic the cries of vultures and crows that sang in the trees, who lived in an era before the nuclear bombings and before the Analog Wars. An era before the Phoenix Witch.

It was lonely. (Though, it seems nothing’s changed, really.)

Poison takes Her silence as a refusal. They sit up a bit straighter and curl a loose strand of hair around their finger. “Of course, you’re under no obligation to tell me.”

“Maya.”

“Huh?”

“Maya. That was my name.” She sighs, softly. “The kids used to tease me and call me Maya the Psychic. I was a really weird kid.”

“No one’s as weird as Fun Ghoul, unless you happened to eat sand for fun back then, too.”

She laughs a bit at that. “I was weird, but I wasn’t batshit like him.”

“It’s a nice name,” Poison hesitantly adds.

“Yeah, but not for me.” She gestures to Herself. “I’m a god now, I suppose. Ought to have a name befitting my position.”

“Do you miss being Maya?”

“Not particularly. I miss the peace of my childhood, where there wasn’t a war for a long, long time. But it was suffocatingly lonely.”

Poison nods, absently. “I understand.”

(They don’t. Poison can’t remember a life before war, a life before they were a soldier. Poison can’t remember a time before the world went to shit. She wishes they did. Or perhaps it’s cruel to have memories of a better life when the life you live in now is so much worse. Is it better to have never loved, than it is to have and lose it all?)

It’s quiet between them now, and She doesn’t mind. It’s a companionable silence, one that She used to be able to only find in Cherri Cola. And yet She knows She could sit here for three hours without saying one word and would still cherish every moment.

“You’re human,” Poison begins, quietly. “Can you take off your mask?”

She watches them right back. Their eyes meet, and it’s such a simple question, just yes or no, yet the words are stuck in Her throat. It’s loaded like a gun, cocked and tight and ready to blow. There’s a deeper meaning behind their words, and She knows this.

Poison lifts their mask off their face. She sees the freckles across their nose, kisses from the sun. There’s an awful tan line around their eyes, like a little raccoon. Their cheeks are red but their eyes are steadfast. She knows what they’re offering by doing this- a silent trade.

Without a word, She lifts Her mask from Her face.

Poison’s breath stutters. They lean even closer towards Her, and they reach out to cup Her face before hesitantly placing their hands on Her shoulder. They stare at Her, soaking in all they can, like a cat basking in the afternoon sun, like a bear chasing down the last few drops of honey it managed to steal. 

“Beautiful.”

The Witch isn’t thinking in this moment. She doesn’t think about their inevitable demise, She doesn’t think about their torrid destiny to die young without mercy. She doesn’t think about how insignificant this moment is on the grand scale of the universe, how unimportant Poison is in a story that was never about them. She doesn’t think about how they will die in six years, three months, thirteen days, six hours, forty five minutes, and thirty two seconds.

She grabs their hands from Her shoulders and places them where Poison wanted to put them just seconds ago. Their hands cup Her face, and god, She can not remember the last time Her face has been cradled like this. Her mother used to do this long ago, smoothed back Her curled hair and cupped Her face in her big hands before giving Her a small kiss.

The Witch places Her hands on the mailbox, gripping it for support. Party Poison holds Her like they’re cradling something fragile, and it feels odd to be seen as something fragile, something that needs protecting. But She can see it in their eyes, in the gleam of the dying light that reveals the flickering inferno within their bright irises. She knows.

And something in Her heart begins to shift, and She begins to feel that same, bizarre protectiveness over them. 

(Has it always been there? Hasn’t She always felt this way- picking them up every single time they fell, every scrape on their skin, every broken bone, every shot, bruise, cut? She knows the answer.)

Poison leans in, quietly. Not a word is spoken during one of the most important moments in either of their lives. The Witch moves in to close the distance and they meet each other halfway.

Their lips collide.

It’s messy and frantic and desperate. There’s a frenzied edge to their movements, as the realization of what they’re doing catches up to them. The Witch knows that She’s just sealed Her fate in becoming a part of a tragic romance, that their red strings of fate will weave a tapestry of misfortune.

She wonders a lot in the upcoming years, but especially in this moment, if Poison knew they were destined to die young, too. If maybe they knew their time was horribly limited, if they knew there wasn’t an afterlife waiting patiently for them even after meeting the Witch.

They break away, and they place their foreheads against each other. Poison reaches out first, lacing their fingers with Her’s and She’s careful not to let Her claws scratch them.

“Not bad, huh?” Poison’s laugh is breathless. “If you had even half the bliss I just felt, you’d be overwhelmed with ecstasy.”

“I’m pretty impressed, I’ll admit.”

Poison winks at Her. “I always knew my destiny was tied to you.”

“And if it wasn’t?”

“Then I’d tie my string of fate on the end of yours to make it true. Or perhaps a nice braid.” Poison gives Her an easy smile. 

“Falling in love will kill you, dear.”

Party Poison smiles at those words, like She had said something sweet. They shouldn’t be smiling, not at Her foreboding words, not at a gentle warning of a doomed future to be. But they smile anyway, and She doesn’t have the heart to tell them to stop, to listen to Her words, to hear their Truth. She’s always been a bit weak for that smile.

“Then I would die a thousand deaths,” they whisper, “if it meant I could fall in love with you a thousand times.”

She knows they aren’t exaggerating. Death means nothing to them now- they’ve died too many times for it to truly mean anything, yet She still feels a fierceness to their voice. If dying meant something, they still would have spoken those words. It makes Her heart skip a beat, to hear such genuine love ooze out of their lips like honey.

“Now, are we girlfriends or what?”

“I prefer the ‘or what’ category.”

Poison playfully shoves Her. “I’m calling us girlfriends whether you like it or not, honey.”

The sun goes down. They’re too busy in each other’s eyes to notice the other stars around them.

-

It started out with a kiss, how could it end up like this?

The Witch finds Herself intertwined in the everyday lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. She’s connected, although She remains unknown amongst Poison’s peers.

But as She spends more and more time with Poison, She ends up spending more and more time with the others, sort of.

Poison and Her don’t indulge their friends in the intimacy of their relationship. Kobra Kid is an atheist and also probably wouldn’t be fond of the idea of his sibling geting fucked by a deity of death. Ghoul believes in Destroya but not Her, and honestly, the Witch likes to fuck with him without him believing in Her. Jet Star is a devout believer in Her, and, well, She doesn’t really wanna lose his respect.

The Girl sees Her sometimes, when She’s supposed to be napping or hanging out with the others but slips away to find Poison and Her idly hanging together, chattering away or doing each other’s nails or simply laying in each others arms. The Girl doesn’t know who She is or what She means, she’s far too young to have a true grasp on the concept of gods and afterlifes and death, but the Girl knows about her.

She’s the only one who’s seen Party Poison’s “gorgeous girlfriend” (according to her), and that does seem to annoy the others. But Poison assures them that they’ll all meet Her in due time, She’s just a bit shy, and the Witch will always berate them afterwards.

She’s not shy, damn it. She’s just.. Unsure of how to interact with so many people. It’s been a very, very long time since She’s just… had friends. Poison has been one of Her first friends in a very long time, and if the Girl continues to peek in on them when they’re supposed to be alone, She just might find a new one.

She lingers around the diner quite a bit, far more than She should, if She’s honest. But Poison always loves Her company, and says that their home is Her home too, and She would be lying if She said the concept of having a home doesn’t make Her heart stutter a bit.

So She lingers about, feeling like a ghost haunting their home. She never really meets Ghoul or Kobra or Jet- none of them have died, thanks to Party Poison making sure to take their shots and because of their own survivor skills and all around good luck. But She knows them, better than so many of the other characters She wrote into existance.

Kobra Kid loves scene music but would rather die than admit it. He has snake bit piercings after a dare from Newsagogo. Hot Chimp became his older sibling after Party Poison was captured by BLi in the city when they were twelve and Kobra ran away to the desert. Kobra can’t stand the heat and would rather be cold than hot. He likes Cobra Starship.

Ghoul knows sign language and Spanish but he can’t read all that well. He spent too much time in zone seven as a kid, wandering the zones after his parents died when he was young, and if he cracks his bones, he can glow a bit. He doesn’t have natural black hair but dyes it with whatever he can find- hair dye, motor oil, even nuclear waste. He loves coyotes because he says he was raised by them as a kid (and yeah, that explains a few things).

Jet Star was in two crews before meeting the Fabulous Killjoys. He loves harsh rock and adores death metal. He knows how to knit but he can’t do it well. He is the only one who can swindle Tommy into lowering his prices. He’s the most devout in his religion, and was the one to teach the Girl how to write letters to Her. He has the worst handwriting and is the worst speller.

The Girl is only a small child, but she picks up quite a bit from her older siblings. She has Party Poison’s scathing wit and awful humour. She has Fun Ghoul’s curiosity and excitement for adventure. She has Kobra Kid’s terrible temper and joy for learning. She has Jet Star’s love for the stars and respect for the dead.

She has Poison’s bravery, Kobra’s strategy, Ghoul’s creativity, and Jet Star’s honesty.

She also has Poison’s stubbornness, Kobra’s rage, Ghoul’s lethargy, and Jet Star’s jealousy.

They all have their own quirks, the very traits that make them humans. She watches them from the sidelines, watches them from Poison’s perspective, and learns so much through the eyes of their loved one. And She learned how human they all were, imperfect and marred and stained with the ugly and the beautiful. They are blemished and flawed and gorgeous because of it.

They aren’t just characters, they aren’t just the legends She wrote them to be. They’re people of flesh and blood who bear the full spectrum of emotion and experience. They are more than the story She carved for them, more than the death She wrote.

They’re more than the letters She carefully caligraphied into truth. They are more than She imagined, impossibly more, and perhaps, She mourns them, too.

-

She still has time, She still has time, before Her world crumbles right before Her eyes, before the very souls She pledged Her love and loyalty and friendship and heart to die painful and horrible deaths.

She has the power to stop it, She has the power to save them, She has the power to change fate.

But She has time, She has time…

(One year, four months, two days, eight hours, seven minutes.)

-

“You were human.”

The Witch gazes at Party Poison, who’s cradling the Girl in their arms. Kobra and Ghoul have disappeared, trying to create some disgusting automation creation in the decaying shack next to the diner. Jet Star was running an errand with Show Pony, which meant Poison was stuck looking after the Girl, who was having nap time at the moment.

Of course, it means it’s the perfect opportunity for Her to be in their presence.

“Yes.”

“Can I…” Poison hesitates, then looks away. It’s strange, to watch them consider their words carefully. She’s always considered them rash and brash and headstrong, but whatever they’re going to say seems to require thought. “Can I ask… how you died?”

It’s Her turn to gaze away. She’s never kept it a secret that ascending to godhood had caused Her to die, but hearing the words fall from their mouth felt strange. She knew She was dead, had died god knows how many years ago during the rise a new empire, and yet it still felt bizarre to remember the fact that She had died.

Poison takes Her silence as an answer of it’s own. “It’s okay, if you don’t want to talk about it. I just… I’m just curious. You know so much about me, and I just want to know more about you. You don’t have to tell me, though.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” She waves away their concern like She was swatting away flies. “I was… Well, I was the first casualty in the Helium Wars.”

Poison watches Her with wide eyes. “But they started, like, decades ago!”

“Yeah. I was the first person to die in that war. Shot to death the first day I was deployed into enemy territory.” She points at Her chest. “Right here.”

“In the heart.”

“It wasn’t painful. It was a quick death, and all that. Not horrific.” 

“So how did you… become a god…?”

“There wasn’t anybody to lead me into the afterlife.” She remains quiet, for a little while. “So I stayed until other people found their way into the plane between the living and the dead. And I began to guide them to an afterlife. They used to call me Mother War, since I guided so many soldiers.”

“Why didn’t you ever enter the afterlife?”

“I can’t.” She sighs. “I’m… magic, now. People believe in me, and I have powers, and now I can’t cross into the afterlife if I wanted to. Not until I die, not until the last person who believes in me dies, too.”

Poison quietly laces their fingers together. “When I die, for real… you won’t be able to follow me, will you?”

She keeps Her eyes on the sleeping Girl. “No.. I can’t follow you into the dark.”

The only sounds for miles are Kobra’s laughter, thick and breathy. The clanging of metal as Ghoul and Kobra thoughtlessly build something stupid and useless but fun in the moment. 

“I’ll wait for you.”

Poison gazes back at Her. Their fingers tighten around Hers, and She can see the resolve in their eyes. “I promise you. We’ll find each other again. When you and I meet again.”

She can’t tell them it’s true. She doesn’t know what lays beyond in the afterlife. She doesn’t know if it’s possible. “We still have time, my love. We still have time.”

Poison looks at Her with a bright smile. “We have all the time in the world.”

-

Jet and Kobra are gone.

Route Guano comes to pass when Party Poison is twenty four. The Girl is only four years old at the time, still just a small child who doesn’t know of the horrors she’ll face later in life. 

The Witch knows exactly what happened to Jet Star and the Kobra Kid, since She was there during the encounter that caused their disappearance.

It’s an all out battle that ensues at a marketplace right off of Route Guano. A couple of exterminators and Dracs caught wind of the location of the market from a rouge ritalin rat who needed money for some drugs. Jet Star and Kobra Kid were present, attempting to haggle in some new supplies, when the Dracs and exterminators invaded.

Jet Star and Kobra Kid get chased off, leading the Dracs away from the market. They manage to kill all of the enemies, but they unfortunately got lost, and Kobra’s bike got destroyed in the battle, which left them roaming the desert in search of the nearest sign of inhabitants.

Party Poison and Fun Ghoul don’t know this, of course. All they know is the information from Dr. D’s broadcast, that their best friends had been dusted out on Route Guano.

In the month that’s occurred between their disappearance to now, the Witch hasn’t seen Poison emerge from the diner. Usually, they meet every night under the stars by the mailbox, where the veil between the living and the dead is so thin it can tear. But Poison hasn’t appeared once in the past thirty days, and She can’t quite blame them.

When She makes a move to empty the mailbox in zone four, there’s a body laying right next to it. It’s a form She can recognise from miels away, a body whose curves and rough edges She knows better than Her own, every scar imprinted in Her mind, every callous and freckle and acne blemish and scrape. She knows who they are without the vibrant hair that glows like the embers of a dying fire in the reflection of the fluorescent moon.

“Party Poison,” She greets, hesitantly. Her lover is in mourning, and She’s not quite sure what to do or say as She moves to stand over them.

Poison glances up at Her, unseeing eyes. In their hands are Jet Star’s aviators and Kobra Kid’s bandana. She knows what they’re meant to be without words- offerings.

“Would you let them die?” They ask.

It’s a vague question, one She could dance around with ease. But She knows that’s not what they need nor want. So She falls to Her knees beside them and gives them an honest answer. “When it’s their time to fall.”

“Is it their time?”

“What do you believe?”

“I don’t know.” There are tears pooling in Party Poison’s eyes, and they clutch the items in their hand tight to their chest. “I don’t know what I believe.”

“Believe in me.”

“How?”

There’s not any anger to Poison’s voice, not a single lick of rage. The inferno within their soul is a sputtering spark, drowning in a pool of ash. Party Poison’s anger has died into fear, into sorrow.

“Trust me.”

“Are they dead?” Poison watches Her closely.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“I can’t interfere in the actions of the living.”

Poison snorts. “Bullshit. You’re dating me. That’s quite the interference.”

“You’re right. And I shouldn’t. But I can’t bend and break every rule for you.”

“I won’t give you their masks.” Poison is resolute. “They can’t be dead. I don’t believe you have such an apathy to them. When we go down, it will be together.”

Poison speaks as if reciting a prophecy. They watch Her with their brows furrowed and their voice unshakable. “I won’t go down by myself, but I’ll go down with my friends. I love them too much, and I refuse to believe they’re dead.”

“If I told you they were dead, would you even believe me?”

“No.” Poison sits up, an expectant expression sitting on their face. “You can remain as cryptic as you want, you can keep your rules. But tell me this, and only this. If they die, can you make sure they… feel safe? Can you promise to make them feel better, when you meet them, before you guide them away into the afterlife? Can you promise me this?”

“I promise.”

“I just..” Poison closes their eyes. “They’re capable. They’re smart. But I just.. I’m not sure I can hope anymore.”

“Can I be the only hope for you? Because you’re the only hope for me.”

“They mean the world to me. I would defy the stars above for them. I can’t just… I won’t leave them.” They stand up, a smal fire burning. “If I have to abandon everything, I will. I have to find them. I don’t give a damn about anything. I have to be there for them.”

“The Girl is more important than anything in this life and the next. You need to stay with her, you need to protect her.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“I’m not. Destiny isn’t set in stone- you always have a choice, Party Poison. Every step you take is yours to take. But I just need you to know that there are some things in this world even bigger than you. You can’t abandon the living for the sake of those who may not be.”

“But it’s my choice.”

“It always is. The choice to live and the choice to die- it’s yours to make. But I just need you to trust that abandoning your still living friends is a mistake you won’t be able to rectify. The Girl is your main concern. The Girl is important. You need to protect her.”

Poison remains quiet for some time. “I believe in you.”

They stand up, then gaze at Her. “When we all die, will it mean something?”

“Yes.” There’s no hesitation, not an inkling of indecisiveness.

They nod. There’s a small crook in their lips. “Jet and Kobra aren’t dead, then.”

She simply waves towards the horizon. “Find out, love.”

Poison pockets the items they have. They don’t pass words between them, they don’t say anything more. They don’t have to.

-

They’re going to topple like dominos, one by one, one by one. She’s their detonator, She’s the cause behind their horrid fate. It has to happen though, everything has to happen, just like She planned it.

But god, every smile of theirs makes Her resolve weaken and weaken.

-

November, 2019.

The worst day in Her entire life begins to happen.

In just a few hours, the Fabulous Killjoys will crumble.

As of now, the standoff between Korse and his squadron of Dracs takes the Killjoys by surprise. They get too comfortable in the fight, they get cocky and arrogant and careless, and it leads to the worst outcome possible- the Girl is stolen right under their noses.

There’s a little line up, where they face off like cowboys preparing to meet their fate at high noon. The sun gleams overhead, and without a signal or verbal agreement, they all whip out their guns and shoot as quick as they can, hoping their trigger finger will save them from a condemned fate.

The Girl watches with wide eyes as each of her siblings topples before BLi.

Jet Star is shot directly in the eye. A shot scrapes the side of Ghoul’s mouth. Kobra Kid is blasted in the arm. Poison is hit in the heart.

They collapse to the ground, dust billowing. BLi keeps them alive, Korse keeps them alive, because this is nothing more than a game of cat and mouse to them. BLi loves killjoys because they love having an enemy to protect the people from, and the Fabulous Killjoys are the perfect enemies to destroy.

Korse doesn’t kill them. He wants them demoralised, he wants them broken, he wants them to become a lesson to other killjoys who cross paths with BLi. Rebellion leads to failure.

So Korse and his lackeys set their lasers on stun, and the Fabulous Killjoys find themselves lying unconscious in the middle of Dreams Boulevard, sporting mocking injuries.

And then, when Korse turns his back to watch triumphantly as the Girl is shoved inside the BLi van, a shot rings out. The crackling of electricity becomes the loudest thing in all of the zones, heard from miles on all ends.

It snags Korse’s shoulder. He stumbles.

Poison’s gun clatters to the ground. They’re on their knees, shaking, every bit of pain coursing through their body as they try to stick it to Korse. Their siblings are still scattered around them, laying in bloodied messes beside them as they try to keep their breath steady.

Korse walks towards them slowly, like a predator stalking his prey. Vans are already taking off, and dust begins to settle in their wake behind Korse as he approaches them. He doesn’t draw a ray gun, though. He simply moves until he’s right in front of Poison.

Poison watches him with unblinking eyes. They’re only staring up physically, and Korse tilts his head a bit, watching them as a small smile begins to curve his lips.

“Don’t you realise there’s nothing left for you to fight for?”

Korse kicks them, right where they had been shot. He pushes them into the ground, and Poison manages to bite back a wince as they stare up at him with eyes that hold the rage of a thousand suns. Korse keeps his foot planted on their chest, and Poison weakly rakes their fingers against Korse’s pant leg, trying to fight until their last breath.

“What more do you want from me?” Korse croons. “I’ve already decimated all that you have. What will you become when I’ve taken from you almost everything?”

“Your worst enemy.” 

Korse laughs. “Look around you. This pretty little lie you’ve been living, pervading yourself as a hero, as the leader to a revolution you used to fight against, amongst the peers you used to slaughter- it’s finally unraveling.”

Korse moves his foot off their chest in favour of getting on top of them. He straddles them, and Poison tries to kick them off but Korse stays belligerently in place. He moves down so their faces are inches apart and he grabs their chin, keeping their head in place.

“You’re a gun, a little plastic weapon.” Korse tilts their head to make them meet eyes. “You’re a faulty little deviant. It’s time we’ve corrected you.”

The gun discarded moments ago is swept into Korse’s fingers. Party Poison’s most prized possession finds itself pressed in the middle of their temple, and Party Poison spits at Korse, their blood hitting his shirt.

Korse smiles. “Say hello to the devil for me.”

A shot pierced through Party Poison’s skull. Korse wipes the blood from the barrel of their gun before standing up and off of their body.

Then, without warning, he sends off six more shots, causing their chest to smolder under the heat of the laser fire. He drops the gun back to the ground, kicks a bit of dirt over it, and begins to walk away. “For yourself, stay dead, little soldier.”

When the last BLi van disappears over the horizon, when the last living thing in the desert quiets it’s cawing, the Witch steps in from Her perch on the cactus not far away. She lingers beside Poison’s body, listening to the soft breaths of their peers. They’re all alive, except for Poison. That can easily be remedied.

Poison’s spirit stands next to their body. There’s a simmering rage within them, and She can feel the heat waves emanating from their soul. She almost feels concerned that She might get burnt from standing so close.

“That bastard!” Poison seethes. “He has no right- he doesn’t know me! He stole the Girl- he-“

“I know.”

Poison glares at the space the BLi vans disappeared into. “We have to go save her! You said so yourself: she’s the most important thing in this life and the next. We have to save her, I have to go back, I have to get her back!”

She knows exactly what’s going to happen next.

She’ll revive them and their little gang of theirs will restock supplies before immediately heading out to Battery City, where death awaits them with open arms. They will save the Girl, and then Party Poison will get shot to death right before their eyes, and Kobra will stop fending off a gang of Dracs to attack Korse before getting shot to death, and those Drac’s will chase after Ghoul and Jet and the Girl, and Ghoul will slam the doors shut to sacrifice himself, and Jet will get shot to death providing cover for the Girl. Because it has to happen, in that order.

She’s memorized every line She’s written, every single letter dotted and crossed. She knows how they’re going to die in less than six hours, knows the exact second their last breath will break free from their parted lips, when the blood on their neck will no longer clot.

She grabs their shoulder, spinning them around. Poison watches Her, appearing confused. She must be getting easy to read, or perhaps She’s just an open book to Party Poison. Either way, Poison can already tell that something is wrong.

“Hey, what’s the matter? You’ll let me go, right? Or is it something else?”

“Party Poison, what are you going to do when I let you back into the land of living?”

“I’m going to get the Girl back.”

“You are going to die.”

Poison blinks, then frowns. “So what? I’ve done it before. It’s no big deal. You can bring me back. What’s wrong this time?”

Carefully, She moves Her fingers from their shoulders to cup their face. Poison watches Her with wide, trusting, anxious eyes. The words in Her throat catch, but She still forces them to come out. The truth must be spoken. This is Her only chance.

“Every person in the world has a set end. The reason I’ve let you come back to life, time after time, is so you can die on the day you were meant to.”

Poison’s eyes are glimmering with understanding. They know what She means, but She still speaks out the next few words.

“When you break into Battery City to save the Girl, when you offer up your body for her, when you and your brothers decide to take on that mega corporation for your sister, you will die. That is your destiny, Party Poison- you’re destined to die today, saving the Girl from Battery City.”

Poison remains quiet. She hopes to god they understand what She’s saying, what message She’s trying to relay. After all these years of keeping this small secret to Herself, it does feel nice to admit it.

“When I die today… I’ll die for real,” they repeat, quiet. “No do-overs, no second chances. It’s my destiny to die here. This is where my story ends- saving the Girl?”

“Yes.”

“Will we succeed?”

“Yes.”

Party Poison nods, silent. They gaze at their siblings, still unconscious, still unaware of all that’s transpired, of the future they are about to see. The air is empty as not a creature stirs.

Finally, Party Poison sucks in a deep breath. “It’s time for me to go, I think. I’ve died so many times, and lived through so much. It’s time to experience something new. Besides, this....” They wave around, all about the desert scene. “It’s not my story anymore. Everyone has moved on from my generation, the generation nothing. I’m just one of the kids from yesterday. So I think it’s time for me to move on, too.” 

“Don’t you want to come home?”

“My way home is through you.”

She moves closer, a bit desperate. They don’t understand what this means, do they? “Party Poison. You’re going to die if you do this. Do you understand this? I can’t bring you back, I can’t offer you a second chance. If you take on this mission, if you lead your brothers down this suicidal war path, you will all die. And I can’t save any of you.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to do this.” She shouldn’t say these things, She shouldn’t try to dissuade them. They have to die, they all have to fucking die. There’s no other way. “Destiny isn’t rigid. It’s not set in stone. You can carve yourself a new path, you can write your own story. You can choose a new destiny. You don’t have to let yourself crumble beneath destiny’s demands. It’s all a choice- it’s your choice to make.”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“You always do, love.”

Everyone has a choice to make. The Witch is about to make one, depending on their answer.

“Then I choose to die.”

Party Poison whispers it with ease, without hesitation. The Witch watches them with fear, as the realisation that Her worst nightmare will play out before Her eyes. She’s going to watch the person She loves the most die horrifically in the middle of battle. She’s going to send them off to a fate She can fix, a fate She can dismantle with just a few strokes of ink.

“Please, you don’t have to.”

“This is my choice. If it means it will save the Girl, then I choose to do it. She means the fucking world to me, and you told me yourself that’s she’s important. Even if she wasn’t, I’d still kill myself a thousand times for her.” Poison’s resolution is steadfast. “If she has even a sliver of a chance of survival, then I’m going to roll the dice.”

“You want to die?”

“Of course not.”

Party Poison moves closer to Her. They quietly lace their fingers in between Her’s. Their voice is soft, not quite unwavering or confident. It’s soft and shaky and whispered in complete confidence to Her.

“I don’t want to die. I’m only twenty six. There’s so much I want to do. But this isn’t my story any more.” Poison rubs their face. “Angel, it doesn’t matter if I have another five minutes or a hundred years. As long as I save one person, as long as I help someone, then it’s all worth it. I’ve done a lot of wrong in this life, and if I’ll die trying to complete one good deed, well, I’d rather do more, but it’s a death I wouldn’t mind.”

She’s a god, a deity of death. She’s guided countless of souls into the afterlife, watches countless people be slaughtered and killed, watches even more die of dehydration and starvation, others from greed and wrath. Tears are brimming in Her eyes, however, and She quietly removes Her mask to see Her lover clearly one last time.

Poison sees Her face, Her eyes stained with tears, and there’s water pooling in their eyes, too. They lean up on their top toes, their fingers gentle against Her skin as they brush away Her tears. They offer Her a warbling smile.

“Come on angel, don’t you cry.”

It’s not right for Poison to be the one to comfort Her. It’s selfish and despicable to be comforted by them when it is their own fate, when it is they who shall perish violently and mercilessly by the hands of the man who has already stolen so much from them. Yet Poison still wipes away Her tears while a few of their own dribble down their cheeks.

“You can go home, Poison. You don’t have to go. Or you can at least wait. Plan.”

“Every minute wasted is a minute that can be used to hurt the Girl. Besides, my way home is through you.”

“I love you.”

“And I love you.”

Poison leans in, and She moves to meet them halfway. It’s a hug, first and foremost. They wrap their arms around Her waist as She pulls them tight against Her chest, revealing in the feeling of heat against Her body. They are tamed fire, a soft crackle of a campfire, the quiet rays of morning sunshine.

She holds them tight, feeling their tears against Her body. They’re just human, afraid to die just like everyone else, afraid of what lies in the beyond, afraid of what fate awaits them in the next life. It fills Her with a new sort of unease to realise how terrified they are, how imperfect their sacrifice is.

They don’t want to do this. They have to do this. Is it a choice, then? To die when there’s no other solution, no other path for you to take?

It’s only natural to not want to die. No one wishes to die, not truly. Those who stare death in the face quickly begin to realise that they want more time, that they don’t want to leave their peers and family behind, that they don’t want to give up the precious life they have.

Party Poison doesn’t want to die.

They break away from Her grasp. There’s a smile on their face that doesn’t belong there. “Oh, what I’d do to get back in your arms. But I’ll be here again, soon.”

They press their lips against Hers, softly, gently, like too much pressure will cause Her to shatter. “I love you. Will you let me go?”

She aches. Everything in Her aches at the sight. This will be the last time She sees them, potentially forever. She keeps their fingers entertained, but She quietly hands their mask back to them.

“I love you,” She whispers back, Her voice on the verge of cracking.

Poison’s soul fades away from Her, their heat slowly dissipating from Her side. She waits until the feeling of their warmth escapes Her lips, until the sensation of their kiss is no more.

Poison’s brothers have surrounded them, awake and disgruntled and confused by everything that’s happened. They’re trying to wake up Poison, who remains still and quiet, just like the tense desert air.

Poison wakes up right after Kobra slaps them, and they jolt upwards. She can see the determination in their eyes, the fires burning and flaring within. There’s no way to divert such a nature, to change fire into doing anything but destroying.

And Party Poison is dead set on destroying everything on their warpath to save the Girl.

-

She trails behind and overhead, following them as they make their way to the radio shack as a pit stop. They want to let blind rage guide them, but they just escaped from a nasty fight. They have cuts to bandage, wounds to lick, and guns to charge. 

“Woah, woah-“ Show Pony’s at the door, watching the trans am pull up to a jarring halt right next to the door. They can already see the battered and defeated Fab Four through the windows, and they can already sense a storm on the horizon.

Party Poison charges into the radio shack like a man on a mission. Ghoul is already out of the trans am, snagging as many gas cans he can carry before heading right back to the car. He’s already planning on building a bomb, one that will level a whole building if they don’t make it back out alive.

Show Pony is rushing outside to meet everyone, and Jet Star stumbles out of the car, his depth perception fucked. Kobra offers him a steadying hand but eventually makes a beeline for where Dr. Death Defying is, following closely behind Party Poison. Show Pony Hager’s Kobra but focuses on Jet Star, trying to tend to his wounds before they get too wound up.

The door slams behind Party Poison and they head straight toward the back. Crows caw distantly and the shuffling of papers, the crinkling of paper, echoes in the confines of a space that seems to exist outside of time.

Dr. Death Defying and Cherri Cola are situated in the very back, right where Party Poison is headed. Cherri Cola glances up at the sound of Poison’s frantic footsteps, and Dr. D continues to shuffle the ancient pieces of papers in his hands. 

“Party Poison?” Cherri asks.

Poison ignores him and heads straight for an old, refurbished desk. They start digging through a drawer, yanking it almost out of its socket before their shaky hands begin to dig through it.

Cherri spares a look to Dr. D, who seems unperturbed at Poison’s arrival. He moves off of Dr. D's desk and heads to Poison, who’s stuffing as many battery packs they can find into their jacket.

Cherri places a hand on Poison’s arm, who immediately yanks away from his touch. “Poison, hey, what the hell is going on?”

Poison slams the desk drawer shut. They’re a wire pulled too tight, a guitar string tuned too high, and they’re near their snapping point. They know what fate awaits them in just four hours, they know exactly what’s going to happen, and they will die for her without hesitation, but that doesn’t make knowing that they _will_ die for her any easier.

“We lost, Soda.” Poison rubs their face. Blood is smeared across their cheeks and forehead, and Cherri looks at them concerned. They look like an honest to god mess, still riddled in bullet holes, still splattered in their own blood from the shots to their head and chest that should have left them a rotting corpse lost to the desert sands. “We fucked up.”

“What happened?”

“We lost the Girl.”

Those four words tell Cherri exactly all that he needs to know. He glances to his left at the calendar hanging on Dr. D’s cork board, and spies Her settled against the window looking in, and the wheels have already begun to spin. Cherri knows what day it is. He knows what this means.

“You’re going to try to save her, aren’t you?”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“You can… you can wait…”

Cherri rubs his arms. His words make something flutter in Her chest. Stick in the ass Cherri, who loves to mock Her for messing with fate, who loves to chastise and berate Her, wants to… change fate?

Of course he does. For as much of a hard ass as he is, he spent years growing up alongside the Fabulous Four. Cherri Cola, who has spent years nurturing and healing and saving the Fab Four, protecting and loving and providing for them, knows that even he can not stand idly by in the wake of a misfortune. He knows destiny nearly as well as She, but he knows he can’t just let his friends die without at least trying to divert the course of nature.

Cherri doesn’t have Her powers, doesn’t truly have the power to change destiny. He is the deity of life, but he can’t bring back the dead. He can only bring back and heal those on the brink, can only offer second chances to those in need of them. He can save your life, in metaphorical and physical senses. But he is not immune to destiny. And he can not stop it.

“You don’t have to go.”

Cherri places a hand on Poison’s shoulder. Blood sticks to Cherri’s fingers, but he doesn’t let go. He knows this will be the last time he’ll ever see Poison, will ever feel the inferno that rages beneath their flesh against his fingertips. He knows.

There’s the distant sound of scuffling. Show Pony’s finished tending to Jet Star and is trying to haggle Kobra Kid, who’s trying to get to Poison and Dr. D. There’s words, hushed and quiet, in the distance. 

“They do.” Dr. D almost sounds somber, but She knows better.

“Cherri…”

“No, listen. You don’t have to do this. You can- you can wait! You can stop and plan and strategize. You don’t have to go right now. You don’t have to rush into this, you don’t have to go.” Cherri swallows, thick. “You don’t have to go.”

Poison watches Cherri with a quiet look. “I do. You don’t.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“Every minute wasted, the Girl is in danger,” Dr. D states. “Let them go, Cherri.”

“You don’t have to die so young, Poison.”

“Neither does the Girl. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

Poison moves away from Cherri. There’s still blood all over their face, still scorch marks on their clothes, still the faint smell of burnt flesh hanging around them. Poison smiles at Cherri, small, with no teeth.

“Don’t mourn someone who’s already dead, Cherri.”

Poison spins towards Dr. D. Their smile sours into something sharp. “Call up Hot Chimp and Newsie. We’re going to need an escape ride. I don’t think any of us are going to be coming out of this alive.”

“Consider it done.”

Poison moves through the doorway without a second thought. Cherri hesitates, then follows after them. Poison brushes past Kobra and Show Pony, who are bickering right outside Dr. D’s office. Cherri chases them down as they exit the building.

There’s a shout and a loud thud. Cherri glances back to see Pony on the ground and Kobra sprinting as fast as he can. Kobra passes something to Poison, who catches it with practiced ease. “Pony stole our keys to keep us from leaving. We better hurry, before they try to stop us again.”

Pony is already hot in Kobra’s heels. Kobra manages to leap into the trans am before slamming the door shut. Show Pony is banging on the window, demanding to talk to Kobra Kid. Jet Star sits behind the passenger seat Kobra’s situated in, staring blankly out the windshield. Pony moves on to haggle Ghoul, who’s still messing with gasoline in the trunk.

“I have to go, Cherri.”

“You don’t. You can stop this. You don’t have to waste your life. Maybe BLi won’t kill the Girl.”

“I know you know just as well as I that the Girl is the key to their destruction, and BLi isn’t going to squander her capture. She’s the bomb, Cherri. She’s the bomb, the detonator.” Poison sighs. “She’s going to succeed where we won’t.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“No, but it will.” Poison swivels in their heels to give Cherri their full attention. “Destiny doesn’t exist. Fate is a sham. What does exist is our actions. Our will. Destiny is created only because it knows what choices we’ll make- not because it makes the choices for us. So I’m making this choice, Cherri. This is my decision, and it’s theirs, too. And we choose to die.”

Cherri reaches out, but Poison moves just out of grasp. “You’re a burning star, Poison. You won’t make it through the night.”

“I’m ready, Cherri.” Poison places a hand on Cherri’s cheek, tenderly. Neither notices the blood it smudges on his cheek. “You need to let me go. Besides, I might not be coming back, but you’ll still be here. I need you to take care of the Girl. Can you do that for me? Don’t deny a dying man their last wish.”

The Witch has these next four hours planned to the very milliseconds. There’s a reason why Cherri happens to be at the same place as Dr. D when the Killjoys arrive, there’s a reason he’s here, and he doesn’t even know it.

Ironically enough, Cherri Cola being at the radio shack, being there hours before the Fab Four will make it to Battery City to rifle through BLi's HQ, desperate to dissuade them from their goal- that propels the Fabulous Killjoys into moving forward in their plan. Cherri Cola, unknowingly, sets this all into motion. 

Because when Poison sees Cherri, they're reminded of the people they’re leaving behind. They’re reminded that the Girl will still have a family even when it seems like her family will crumble around her. There are others who care about her, who love her, who will love her when they are long gone.

So Poison touches Cherri’s cheek and gives him a quiet smile because they believe Cherri will be able to do what they can’t. They drop their hand and they turn on their heels, marching off towards the inevitable. Cherri doesn’t follow them this time, just watches as they slide into the driver’s seat, as they push Pony out of the way, as the dust becomes kicked up in their wake.

Dr. Death Defying rolls out beside him. “It has to be this way.”

She knows he’s saying this not only for Cherri, but also to Her. His righteousness makes Her blood boil within Her, his impassiveness to an apathetic fate She carved out making Her feathers bristle. 

“No.”

She says this more to Herself than to them. But Dr. D catches Her voice, and turns to gaze at Her with a disappointed stare. “Phoenix Witch…”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

She doesn’t bother lingering at the radio shack, She won’t listen to a single word Dr. Death Defying has to offer. No, no, She holds the power to change fate itself right within Her palms. She can fix what should have been fixed years and years ago, when Poison and Her kissed for the first time under the tangled sheets of the sunset sky.

She knows what She has to do.

-

Poison and their friends are driving, breaking every speed limit restriction possible. She’s frantic as She slips away from them and into a new plane of reality.

She has the power to change this misfortune, to fix a mistake She wrote. Destiny isn’t written in stone, it’s written in ink, in the pages of a well worn book. Pages can be torn and shred and ink can be blotted out or faded. Destiny isn’t set in stone.

She knows that if She does this, She’s fucking up every single plan She’s written for the future. She’s destroying the Girl’s future, She’s ruining her storyline, She’s throwing the Saviour to Be under the bus, and yet She can’t find Herself to care. For once in Her life, the Witch isn’t living in the future, isn’t plotting and awaiting events to unfold- She’s living now, here, in the present.

There’s only so much time before the choice to unravel all Her had work disappears from Her fingertips. She doesn’t have time to rewrite a new future, one that can work, one that can still allow for the Saviour to Be to rise up. She doesn’t have to time to flesh out all the intricacies and connect all the storylines and weave together a new tapestry of fate.

She doesn’t have time.

She rummages through Her little shopping cart, pulling out book after book. By god, She shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t even be contemplating this. She’s throwing away the perfect future She’s written, throwing away the life of every single wretched and damned soul stuck in Battery City, stuck in the desert. She’s destroying the future She’s worked so hard for, and yet She just doesn’t care.

It was never about the Fabulous Killjoys- they’re nothing but footnotes in the epic of history. But when all anybody is but a speck in the grand scheme of the universe, when She Herself means nothing in comparison to how vast time is, when evens gods have expiration dates- how can saving the lives of four, disposable killjoys be important? How could this cause as much damage as She’s anticipated?

She finds the books She’s looking for.

It’s Party Poison, written with ink as red as the rage within their soul, the blood that stains their hand, the dye that’s become their natural hair colour. It’s their destiny, their fate, right within Her fingertips. She has the power to stop the monstrosity of a future that’s about to arrive.

She plucks a feather from one of the crows that have flocked to Her side and She uses Her claws to tear at Her own flesh. Blood dribbles down Her arm, She dips Her feather into it and begins to write.

She scribbles out the last few moments of Party Poison’s death. She rewrites it entirely, rewrites fate with a handfull of words. All it takes is a split second to save a life, and changing a split second is all it will take to stop the collapse of the Fabulous Killjoys.

Korse sets his gun to stun.

Poison won’t die when they slip down that wall, when Korse sends a shot straight to their neck. Poison will live, will still be breathing after they whisper to the Girl to run, will still be alive and well and alive.

She rips out Jet Star and Fun Ghoul land Kobra Kid’s pages, frantically writing as quick as possible. The end is soon to arrive, and She needs to work faster, harder, better. She rewrites their deaths, switching the safety from kill to stun on every Drac’s blaster. Kobra won’t be shot to death in the lobby, Ghoul’s suicidal self sacrifice won’t lead to a valiant death, and Jet Star won’t bleed out on the hood of the trans am.

If She’s already decided to fuck up fate, She might as well save every soul She considers to be family, not just Party Poison. Because the Fab Four are destined to live together and die together, and She could not dare separate them knowing She had a choice in the matter.

So She rewrites history, and it’s as easy as that. All it takes is the adjustment of one second, one small, small second, to switch a button from kill to stun, to save the lives of four insignificant killjoys from their miserable fate.

That’s all it takes.

She closes their books.

-

She shouldn’t have done that, She shouldn’t have done that- it’s not Her right to change fate, to destroy the Girl’s story just to save some charming friends. It’s not fair of Her to fuck up everything just for Her own selfish desires.

Because it is selfish of Her, truly, to keep them alive. She isn’t doing this for the Girl, She isn’t doing this for them, She isn’t doing this for anyone but themself.

The Witch doesn’t know what lays beyond in the afterlife. She’s the deity of death, not of heaven or hell or purgatory or whatever waits for them after the pearly gates She guides lost souls towards. She doesn’t know if eternal rest or damnation lays beyond those doors.

She doesn’t know what happens when people die, when they slip beyond Her grasp form this inbewtween plane, when they move on into the afterlife. She was barred from entering all those years ago, without a single person to help guide her wandering soul. Now She leads others towards an idea She can not grasp.

And truth be told, that fact terrifies Her to no ends. She can’t bear the thought of sending Party Poison and Kobra Kid and Jet Star and Fun Ghoul into the afterlife without knowing if they shall ever meet again. She doesn’t even know if once She dies, She’ll end up in the same place as them.

She can’t let them disappear into the unknown, She can’t push them towards an afterlife She knows nothing about. She can’t abandon them to somewhere She can’t follow. She can’t leave Party Poison, She can’t let them go. She can’t let them go.

She’s watched countless of others die, guided even countless more towards an afterlife She can’t seem to get her claws on. And yet this time it’s different, it's completely different, because She’s in love. Because She finally fucking understands love.

She’s completely blind to any reasonable thought. She can’t abandon Party Poison to a life She knows nothing of, She can’t bear the idea of them dying and being sent to a place She can’t follow. And She might not love them romantically, but She still loves the rest of the Fabulous KIlljoys, still adores Ghoul and Kobra and Jet, still wanting them to be happy and safe and loved. She just doesn’t know what She’s condemning them to when She leads them to the afterlife, to those doors that refuse to open for Her.

It’s selfish and foolish and destructive, but She saves their lives because She is afraid.

She’s human, that’s all. She was human, and even with Her divine status, at Her core, She is still just an unlucky human rendered into becoming the inhumane. She is still marred with the same imperfections as those She is trying to save, still fallible and subject to human emotions.

It is Her humanity that becomes a fatal flaw.

(Though not for Her).

-

It happens.

The Fabulous Killjoys burst into the city, a vibrant vortex of vivacious and violent colours. They make damn sure to cause a scene as they enact what they believe to be their final showdown.

They slip into the facility, a solemn shadow casted upon each of their faces. Their guns are drawn and cocked, the safety slipped off. They’re dressy for a battle, and they’re ready for a war.

Dracs swarm in on every side of them. It’s exactly as She had planned, a sea of white slowly engulfing the entire building, encircling their prey. The Killjoys keep their heads high, their hands steady, and their shots precise as they make their way past the Drac’s into the heart of the building.

Party Poison reaches the Girl first, pulling her into a tight hug. They know it’s the last time they’ll see her in this life, they know that this is the end, and they are going to make their last moments in her memory to be something more positive, in the case that whatever fate lays beyond them isn’t quite a cheerful end.

She follows after them as they cover her, electricity crackling in the air. Dracs have them surrounded on all sides, and the Killjoys are slowly moving further and further away, trying to protect the Girl from haphazardly fires lasers. The Girl stands in the midst of this chaos, watching as the world around her begins to shift, watching as her entire life is on the verge of crumbling in just a few more moments.

She covers her hears, the sounds of electricity humming and firing and footsteps and screaming becoming too much from her. She shuts her eyes tight, not wanting to watch the carnage around her, just like she’s always told to do when a fight is about to get nasty and not appropriate for her young, young eyes that have already seen so much, trusting her siblings to protect her and save her. 

Poison has completely broken off from their siblings. Kobra and them split apart, and now Poison is moving solo, ripping apart Dracs with their high powered explosive shots. 

One Drac manages to get too close. Poison shoots them and accidentally yanks off their mask in the process.

The Witch watches, watches as everything comes crumbling down.

Poison stumbles, falters, for once in their fucking life. The gun quivers in their hand as they gaze upon the corpse, as they turn their wretched gaze on the damage they’ve just inflicted. It’s a moment of weakness, a speck in the grand scale of time, but a second is all that’s needed to change the tide in war.

Korse shoves then against the wall. Poison’s eyes snap towards him. They keep their gun to their side, because they know this is their end, they know that their destiny ends here, and they can not change what is inevitable. They had made their peace with the concept of dying years and years ago, made peace at the idea of being slaughtered by their worst fucking enemy.

Poison gazed at Korse with apathy. There’s not a witty snark on their tongue, nothing coy to whisper. Poison’s last words won’t be wasted on him, won’t be wasted in playing this cat and mouse game that has now come to an end.

Korse draws his gun, pr  
essing it tight against their neck. He tilts his head, almost proud, watching Poison under his grasp.

But Poison isn’t looking at him.

The shot echoes through Battery City, throughout the desert. It’s louder than every sound in that moment, than the sounds of other blasters going off, than bodies hitting the floor, then the Killjoys war cries, then glass shattering and footsteps pattering. It’s louder than the animalistic screams that rips through Kobra Kid’s voice box at the sight of Poison’s brains being blown out right before his eyes.

The only sound louder in this symphony of murder, in the cacophony violence, is the soft whimpers of the Girl as she opens her eyes in time to watch Party Poison get shot right in front of her.

When Party Poison goes slipping down that wall, bleeding out, their last few thoughts aren’t about Korse, aren’t about their potential death, aren’t about the fact that their world is crumbling, isn’t even about Kobra Kid. Poison’s eyes are focused solely on the Girl, who watches them with tears in her eyes, because she might only be six god damn years old, but she has seen enough firefights in her life to understand what was happening.

Party Poison, in their last few moments, reaches out for her, extending a shaky hand. They know she’s important, so much more important than anyone in the room, more important than them or their brothers. They know she needs to be saved, she needs to escape, she needs to flee before the destiny of the zones can unravel. So they whisper their last word for her, for her ears only, as Korse smiles at the bloody mess they’ve made of his worst enemy.

“Run.”

Korse is shot in the shoulder. Kobra is gunning it straight towards Korse, all self preservation lost. The only thing Kobra can see is fucking red- their sibling’s hair, the scorch marks on their neck, the blood splattered against the barrel of Korse’s gun.Kobra ignore the Dracs he had been fighting in favour of pursuing Korse, until Kobra Kid is eventually shot down, tumbling to thw floor as shot after shot after shot sears through his skin.

The Dracs move after Jet Star and Ghoul, who have guided the Girl away from the slaughtering of half their crew, trying desperately to escape this hellhole. The Dracs have caught up and started shooting, and Ghoul slams the doors shut after Jet Star and the Girl, tossing a wink before whispering, “Save yourself, I’ll hold them back.”

Jet Star takes the Girl’s hand and pulls her along, trying to move away before they watch Ghoul’s untimely death. He does his best to hold them back, to save them, but Ghoul eventually is shot down, his blood splattering against the glass doors as Dracs fire round after round at him.

Jet Star and the Girl can taste freedom. The news van is just yards away, but there’s fire blasting from behind, and Jet Star has already watched his entire crew go down in a hail of bullets and isn’t afraid to join them. So he stops in his tracks, pushing the Girl forward before firing back at the sea of white.

A shot nicks him in the heart. Jet Star falls, hard, on the top of the trans am hood, spralwed across it from the inertia of the blast. The Girl is pulled into the van as Jet Star sucks in his last breath, and byt the time the van pulls away from the ashes of an era, the Fabulous Killjoys are no more.

-

So everyone thinks.

-

Party Poison awakes, not at all expecting to. The Witch watches from afar, not daring to meddle in this new future She’s crafted. 

The Director stands across from them, a smile on her painted lips. The Witch has a feeling She knows exactly how this meeting is going to go.

“Party Poison,” she croons. “How wonderful it is to see our most prized exterminator.”

Poison laughs. “I was hoping you’d be disgusted instead, but I am rather charming…”

“You do know where you’re at, don’t you? You remember what happened.”

“Seems your tin soldier Korse isn’t all that great at his job. I’m not really exterminated.”

“Oh, you aren’t, but all of your siblings certainly are.” She leans forward and runs her fingers through their hair. “Kobra Kid, Jet Star, Fun Ghoul… they’re all nothing but smouldering husks.”

“But the Girl lived.” Poison’s smiling, sharply. The Director scoffs at them.

“Not for long. You know standard protocol, don’t you? You remember.”

Poison tosses their hair out of their face. “Hard to forget. Considering I’m being taken as a prisoner, it looks like you’re taking route b. So you plan on torturing me for information.”

“Great job. I knew our training was still in that pretty little head of yours.” She raps her knuckles against their forehead. “I am going to torture you for information about the Girl and those nasty radio pirates. And when I’m done with that, when I have you begging for the sweet mercy of death, I’m going to bleach out your brains. I’m gonna stuff you so full of amnesia you won’t even know what the word rebellion means.”

She runs her fingers through their hair again for a moment before grabbing hold and yanking their head up. “You’re going to become an exterminator again. Usually, we don’t waste resources conditioning those who have broken away, but we’ve never had an exterminator break away before. I need people to understand that this system is infallible. Once a part of BLi, always a part of BLi.”

She lets go of their hair and moves away toward a rolling cart. She picks up a pair of pliers and tests them, opening and closing them for a few moments, letting the metal clangs echo for a bit. “Well, let’s get to this. I’m going to enjoy hearing you scream.”

-

And Party Poison does scream.

A person can only take so much fucking pain. The Director is not shy about inflicting damage, not at all. She smashes bones, saws into their skin lacerations that can barely clot, yanks out teeth, waterboards, pulls out nails, and so many other insidious deeds. She has no qualms destroying their body, because BLi does have state of the art doctors, and whatever damage she inflicts on them can easily be undone. 

For weeks, she works on them. She chips away at them physically, destroying every fleshly weakness she can exploit. She wants them ruined, utterly ruined, and she’s getting there.

While the Director is definitely enjoying this, the Witch knows there’s a reason she’s trying to systematically break them down. The other Killjoys- Jet Star, Kobra Kid, and Fun Ghoul- managed to get off easy. They were sent for re-education in the Tube, force fed medication and propaganda, and had their personality bleached and drained. There was no real torture like what the Director was doing, because it wasn’t really necessary.

Party Poison has already gone through the extermination process. They’ve already been Draced against their will, they’ve already had their soul tampered with. Party Poison’s soul has built up an immunity to their wicked techniques, and if the Director wants a chance at turning Poison back into the pretty little puppet she had before, then she needs their spirit completely shattered, so the amnesia can fill in those cracks and reshape them however she sees fit.

She needs to make sure that the bleaching process will work. By weakening their soul, it’s practically a guarantee that they won’t make it out with a single memory of their past life.

So the Director does her work, swinging a hammer against their bones, scalding them, drowning them, every single awful thing she can think of to do.

For Party Poison’s credit, they do manage to last quite a while under her care. The Director doesn’t resort to torture often unless in special cases, such as the original killjoys like Mike Milligram, considering BLi doesn’t take prisoners unless to Drac them. Most people fold within a week. Poison manages to keep their head up high for a month and a half. 

But Poison is fucking human. Because no matter how much the desert tots them as a legend, as a hero, as untouchable, as unflinching in the face of death, the fact remains that Party Poison is just a lost, twenty something year old who only ever wanted to be a good person. They’re not perfect, they’re not unyielding, they’re not shatterproof. Party Poison has a breaking point.

Eventually, the Director reaches it.

Party Poison crumbles. They’re under the belief that their entire world has already fallen apart, that all of their siblings are dead in their grave. A person can only withstand so much fucking pain before they crack, before they cave.

Party Poison lets slip where one of Dr. D’s secret bases is. It’s a slip of the tongue, something that haunts them until they can’t remember who they are. But the damage is dealt, and the Director sends a strike squad there, hopeful to catch the Girl and the DJs off guard.

They don’t find the Girl, who was hiding out with Cherri Cola at the time. They find Show Pony and only Show Pony that fateful day, who had been travelling through the zones to check and make sure the alternative bases were still functioning. 

When Party Poison learns their one little tip lead to Show Pony’s graphic slaughter at the hands of BLi, it does tip the scales. Party Poison finally fucking shatters, and the Director has them on their knees, practically begging to be drenched in amnesia so they can forget all the shit they’ve done with their fuck of a gun, so they can forget their friends who were killed because of them, so they could forget how they destroyed the very lives of everyone they care about.

The Director listens to them beg, and it’s a sound that haunts the Witch for years to come. It’s worse than their screams, than their sobs, than their howls. It’s so much fucking worse than listening to them struggle in pain, because at least they were struggling, struggling to rebel and remain a menace. But now Poison’s nothing but a groveling mess.

The Director smiles at them. “Ready the bleaching process.”

-

The Witch doesn’t intervene. She’s terrified to inflict any more damage on this timeline than She already has. She doesn’t visit Party Poison while they’re stuck in hell with the Director, and doesn't offer them comfort or warm words. She doesn’t speak to them or help them escape, just watches them from afar.

She’s on thin fucking ice, and She knows it. The other zone deities are not pleased with Her, are not at all happy about this new timelines that’s formed because of Her refusal to give in to apathy. Dr. Death Defying is especially displeased with Her, and She knows Destraya, while unsurprised by the turn of events, is equally not on great terms with Her.

She wants to save her beloved, She wants to save theri friends, She wants to protect them all and hold them dear to Her heart, but She fucking can’t. She can’t risk doing any more damage than She’s already done. This is unstable territory, a new world being created right before Her eyes as the butterfly effect shifts and unthreads the tapestry She weaved so long ago.

If Party Poison manages to die, She doesn’t think She’ll be able to save them. She might condemn them to remain a ghost upon this wretched earth just as She had been when She had first died and there was no one there to guide Her. She can not allow Poison to suffer more in the after life, and She can not let them die when She just rewrote history for them to live.

So She remains to the side lines, watching, waiting, trying to figure out Her next move.

Where does She go from here?

-

Party Poison goes through re-education.

Korse shoves them inside the Tube. She knows he’s upset that they didn’t just kill them, She knows he’s upset that this game of cat and mouse didn’t end in a casualty. Korse has a respect for Party Poison, even if he won’t admit it to himself- he wanted to give Poison a quick and swift death, wanted to eradicate the zones of them in one swift move.

But Korse was there to watch their torture. Korse was there to watch Poison shatter like a mirror. And Korse is still Korse, Korse is still not much better than a mindless Drac, but the Witch can see how watching their worst enemy succumb to the Director’s torture is perhaps chaning him, ever so slightly.

Korse shoves them inside the Tube, and his fingers flicker towards his gun. He wants to shoot them dead, he wants to deliver a mercy blow, but orders are orders. He slams the doors shut and turns on his heels. He won’t feel regret over this for a few more years, when he finally falls in love and understands what exactly the killjoys had been fighting for.

Party Poison leans against the wall, swathed in white. The Witch watches from the window, watching as Poison closes their eyes and knits their fingers into a prayer position. They open their lips and their last words tumble out, a soft jumble of words She knows are a prayer.

“Saints protect her now,” they plead. They don’t have to say a name for Her to know who they’re talking about. The Girl. It’s always about the Girl. “Come angels of the Lord. Come angels of the unknown.”

It’s their famous last words. The Witch watches as the very first person She’s loved in years is wiped clean from this earth.

-

The exterminator bares Her lover’s face, their sharp features, their freckled cheeks, their uneven teeth, their lips, their skin. But the monster She sees no longer has their eyes.

The exterminator is a husk, an empty shell. They’re a blank slate, ripe for the Director and her minions to shape into whatever she so desires. She helps them out of the Tube and tells them all about themself, how they’re a top ranking exterminator who was kidnapped by a gang of mischreants known as the Fabulous Killjoys, how a failed suicide bombing on Fun Ghoul’s part after being found by Korse resulted in their amnesia and the deaths of the people that kidnapped them.

The exterminator listens to every word and doesn’t dare question. The Director happily feeds them lie after life, telling them that other killjoys killed their parents and their twin sister. How the exterminator volunteered to become a weapon of BLi in hopes of eradicating the rats infesting society with their plagues of art and rebellion. 

The exterminator listens. And the Director hands them a gun, tells them to rejoin with their peers on level three, and she sends them on their first mission with Korse to make sure the bleaching and re-education worked just as well as she had hoped.

The exterminator follows after Korse, like a little duckling. They travel to the Nest during a party, and there’s dozens of killjoys ripe for the picking. The exterminator isn’t wearing a mask, isn’t hiding the face that half the desert fell in love with and the other half despises. The killjoys watch as their fallen leader appears before them like an apparition, a phantom pain, and for a moment hope swells in the shitty little shack until they cock their gun and electricity replaces the static.

There’s not a single survivor to report that Party Poison isn’t dead.

Blood pools around their feet and the exterminator blows the smoke from their gun and exits the club.

-

The Director doesn’t reveal that the exterminator used to be Party Poison. She doesn’t want any of the desert realising their pretty little rebels leaders are still alive and within grasp. She doesn’t want rescue missions taking place, and she doesn’t want to risk a chance that Party Poison’s bleaching could wither and fade. She puts them on a tight leash and makes sure that the other killjoys are spread thin across the city.

Jet Star is a guard to a weapons factory on the east side of the city, far away from the siren call of the Lobby and the desert. Ghoul is a janitor shoved in some small office building towards the South, far away from his juvie hall contacts. Kobra Kid is a pill dispensary worker near the west. He is unfortunately next to the Lobby, but the Director doesn’t seem to be particularly worried.

The Killjoys have been disbanded, spread far away from each other. They’ve all been Draced and stuffed with pills. They’ve all become complacent in their meaningless little lives. They’ve become the antithesis to the war they were trying to wage.

It makes Her sick.

(She should have let them die.)

-

The Witch watches over all of them, silently. She created this fucked up future, and She has no idea what’s going to happen now that She’s destroyed everything. She keeps an eye on all of them, nervous that they might end up killed at any moment since this future is completely unpredictable.

She keeps Her distance from not-Party Poison. The exterminator doesn’t recognise Her, and love isn’t the answer to everything. She can’t just expect them to suddenly become a good person again in Her presence, She can’t just expect them to wake up and become the love of Her life again.

When She saved their life, She knew She would be destroying everything She had ever done and will ever do. She knew that by letting them live, She’ll have to let them all go. They are no longer the people they once were, they are no longer the rebel heroes whose stories She wrote without a care in the world, and they are no longer the band of rebels She had fallen in love with all that time ago. They are nothing but drones now, and She can not dare to intervene in this new life they’ve been forced into.

She can not step into their lives and fix the things She broke. She sealed their fate in a whole new way. She decimated the very things that made them the Fabulous Killjoys.

She tried Her damdest to save them all, and by doing so, She’s cursed them to a new hell worse than anything that could have possibly awaited them in the afterlife. She didn’t save them after all.

-

The husk of a killjoy exterminator continues to destroy.

They serve mindlessly, completing mission after mission. They do exactly what they were conditioned to do: slaughter and maim and ruthlessly murder all those BLi decides stands in their way. They follow under Korse for a few months, the Director wanting to make sure they could be trusted, before sending them loose into the desert.

They don a new mask and they become a brand new shiny weapon for the Director to toy with. There’s no thoughts in their head as they raze villages of desert borns, as they slaughter rebellious teenagers still holding paint cans, as they destroy, destroy, _destroy_.

They attack another Nest party one day, while the Girl is there. She’s eight years old, and she’s decided that she’s a bad luck charm that shouldn’t bother sticking around with the DJs. She watched Cherri Cola become a wavehead, watched him waste away in his sorrows under the sun. She watched Dr. D retract into himself, watched him become even more desperate to end the fight against BLi. 

She left one day a few weeks back with nothing but a note left behind and the clothes on her back. They don’t need her around, not when she causes so much trouble, not when so many fucking bad things happen while she’s around.

And she finds herself at the Nest, trying to get directions to Tommy Chow Mein’s shop when everything goes to shit.

It’s an all out raid. Not-Party Poison leads a group of Dracs against the group of drunks, and it’s honestly barely even a fight. It’s a massacre. People drop like flies left and right, and the Girl watches yet another slaughter occur right before her eyes, and if she wasn’t already convinced that she was unlucky, then this sealed the deal for her.

Bead scattered across the sands. Blood splatters on crisp clothes. Footprints indented the grains. Electricity boiled the thick air. Screams echoed across the vast.

Not-Party Poison makes their way through the entire party, picking off as many people as they can manage. The Witch watches from the sidelines as dozens of young adults and teenagers collapse to the ground, watches as heads roll and eyes close and blood pools. She watches this massacre, and She’s served through war, and She’s seen thousands of other scenerios just like this one, yet this time Her stomach coils at the sight.

Because Her beloved is the one slaughtering these people, all over again, just like they had when they were seventeen, like nothing had ever changed. It’s as if Party Poison had never fucking existed, that all their hard work to become a better person, to be more than an exterminator, is being erased right before Her very eyes as Party Poison shoots a man straight in the forehead before aiming a gun at his partner’s heart and squeezing the trigger.

The Girl watches, watches, watches, just as silent as the Witch, just as horrified, just as helpless. She watches as fires wage, as bodies char, as blood drowns, as smoke filtrates the air like a smog. She watches the horrors before her eyes and she can’t make herself move.

And that’s when not-Party Poison spots her.

In the middle of a gunfight, in the center of the party, they find her. Because she’s right there in the center of it all, just like she was when the Fabulous Killjoys died; she’s in the epicenter of an inferno. Always, she’s always the center of the storm.

The Witch stands by and watches. She can’t do anything, She can’t step in and stop not-Party Poison from shooting the little girl they tried to give their life for. She can’t stop them from destroying everything.

She can’t be seen by living people, unless they’re like Party Poison and they’ve been killed hundreds of times already. But She doesn’t know if Party Poison can see Her, She doesn’t know if those pills have ruined the magic between them. She doesn’t know if She could even be of help.

Poison moves in towards her. The Girl stays where she is, trembling. She doesn’t run, she doesn’t flee, she doesn’t do anything but stand and stare at the husk of her former friend, except she doesn’t realise this living corpse is the very sibling that gave up their life for her two years ago.

Not-Party Poison aims their blaster right between her eyes. She isn’t crying, she isn’t shaking anymore. She simply stands there, her hands turned into fists, her breaths stuttering as she waits. The Witch knows that at just eight years old, she’s already tired of surviving.

Nothing happens for a few moments. They stare each other down, just watching, as fires wage on and gun shots echo and screams shatter the still night air.

Not-Party Poison lowers their gun. They turn around and shoot a man with a mohawk right in the ribcage. “Run.”

The Girl doesn’t have to be told twice.

She runs. She runs as fast as her little legs will carry her, until her lungs threaten to collapse, until her legs are numb, until her heart is pounding so loud it drowns out the screams in the distance. She runs and runs and runs, until the fires crackling becomes a speck in the distance.

Not-Party Poison doesn’t think twice about her. They go back to killing, and it only takes a few more minutes before the screams stop, before the electricity turns to gentle hums, before the blood stops gushing. The firefight is over.

They leave in their set of vans.

The Girl watches the vehicles disappear into the horizon. She’s wondering why that exterminator’s voice sounded familiar.

-

Not-Party Poison is feed more pills. They work their way up from a level one exterminator to a level five. The Director adores them. Korse is beginning to feel not jealousy but disgust for what they’ve become and what he’s created.

Not-Fun Ghoul remains a quiet janitor in that office building. The civilians, desperate for a bit of entertainment in their lives, throw their trash at him when they’re bored. He picks it up diligently.

Not-Jet Star gets a promotion. He’s still Draced, but now he acts as the head of security in that weapons facility. He doesn’t feel pride, but he’s close to it. There haven't been very many break ins, but he’s managed to kill most of the Killjoys who have tried, like Neon Avenger.

Not-Kobra Kid works in his dispensary without a single incident until his third year.

He’s walking home at night, right off his shift. It’s just a normal day, another night clocking out and heading back to his shitty little apartment to scrounge up some food before falling asleep to the tv and waking up to replay his day all over again.

It just so happens that a gang of juvie halls were escaping from an attempted robbery at a different weapons facility on this side. Alarms start blaring, and not-Kobra Kid watches as a group of adults in brightly coloured clothes attempt to run past him towards a car parked on his left.

One of the adults brushed into him, and the two went tumbling into the ground.

“No time!” One of them shouts. “Take him hostage!”

Before not-Kobra could even voice out his displeasure, someone’s wrapped a hand around his mouth, and has a gun jammed into his spine and he’s being yanked into the car with four other people.

The car starts and not-Kobra has the sudden realisation that he’s sitting right in between two juvie halls that likely just did some sort of crime. “I’m going to die,” he states, flatly, but his heart is racing because he was supposed to take his second dosage of medication as soon as he got home.

The person on his right moves their hand off his mouth. A gun is still shoved in his ribcage, but at least not-Kobra can breathe. “Sorry man, but in case Mom and Dad find us, we need some sort of leverage.”

“Hey, wait.” The juvie on his left leans into not-Kobra Kid’s face. “Hey, you look familiar?”

The person driving flicks their attention towards not-Kobra, his eyes glancing into the rear view mirror. They quint at him, appearing curious. “You’re right. That kid does look familiar.”

The passenger seat moves back, nearly crushing the person on not-Kobra’s right. “Hey!”

A head peers over at not-Kobra from the seat. A flicker of light casts over the car as they travel under a glitching lamp light. With all eyes on not-Kobra, suddenly everyone in the car inhaled as the light removed the shadows over not-Kobra’s face.

“It’s Kobra Kid,” the person on his left whispers.

“No, no, he’s dead!” The passenger seat squats and turns around to face the road. The driver flicks their eyes at not-Kobra.

“It’s Kobra Kid, alright. What happened to you?”

“Who the hell is Kobra Kid?”

“I can believe it, we found one of the Fabulous Killjoys,” the person on his right practically swoons. “Dude, the entire desert thinks you’re fucking dead. Oh my god, I can’t believe this. We have to call Dr. Death Defying, he’ll want a piece of this.”

“Maybe we’ll get rewarded,” the driver hums.

“What are you guys talking about?” Not-Kobra demands. “The Fabulous Killjoys are nothing but a group of rebels who were rightfully executed under Exterminator Korse’s command. Who is Dr. Death Defying?”

“Kobra’s been bleached,” the person on their left moans. “Of course.”

“What are you talking about? Let me go!”

“We’re the Youngbloods,” the driver simply states. “We were good friends with the Fabulous Killjoys, long before they died. Though, I guess they didn’t really die, if seeing you is anything to go by... Anyway, don’t worry, not-quite-Kobra Kid. Once we get to our base, we’ll explain everything.”

“I’m not Kobra Kid.”

“Not now.”

-

When Kobra Kid gets kidnapped by the juvie halls, Kobra gets a crash course in everything that’s fucked up with BLi. Kobra gets a history lesson over the Fabulous Killjoys, and begins to figure out that everything isn’t what it seems.

It takes a few months, but Kobra stops taking those pills.

Kobra doesn’t become Kobra Kid, not right away. They become a different version of Kobra Kid, someone a bit more rugged, a bit more afraid, a bit more nervous. His hot temper is still there, but he’s not the same as he once was.

His memory is fucked up. The more they talk about the Fabulous Killjoys, the more he’s not on those pills, the more he begins to remember. But it’s just moments, just a handful of memories- it’s not an identity to latch on to.

Not-Kobra becomes the Kobra Kid again, by the fifth year anniversary of the death of the Fabulous Killjoys. But what’s been broken always has cracks, and Kobra Kid isn’t the same person he was when he died.

-

It’s in the middle of the fifth year when not-Party Poison begins to repeat history.

They’re developing a resistance to the pills they’re being stuffed with. A tolerance is growing, from having spent five years as an exterminator beforehand, and now another five years as an exterminator. 

It takes months for them to realise the pills aren’t working as well as they should be. And it takes months for not-Party Poison to feel their first real emotion other than rage in five years.

It’s on a mission when they’re in the desert, leading a crew of brainless and braindead Draculoids on a raid. This time, it’s at some nightclub called Bullets, and their mission is to simply seek and destroy any killjoys partying away in the small building BLi finally got the coordinates of. Apparently, it’s a pretty popular attraction.

The exterminator raids the small club, shots firing as soon as they open the door. Not-Poison takes the lead, directing the Dracs into surrounding the entire club. An all out massacre occurs as the club attendants try their damnedest to fight back, but half of them are drunk out of their minds and there’s simply too many Dracs for them to defeat.

Not-Poison waves their way through the fight, pulling their trigger thoughtlessly. The Witch watches from the sidelines and sees the smallest shifts in their behaviour. It’s not so thoughtless anymore.

Their hands shake, ever so slightly. There’s hesitation flickering over their face just before they pull the trigger. They don’t seem to be pulling the trigger near as frequently as they used to, and there’s not much anger behind their actions.

Poison corners two women with their gun, backing them further and further away. They’re not sure why they aren’t shooting them dead where they stand. Perhaps it’s because they’ve proved themselves to be the most capable fighters in the club, and they want to make an example of them. Right.

The women glare at them. Their guns are aimed straight at their chest while they aim a blaster at the shorter person’s head. The Witch follows closely behind, instantly recognising the two women. They’re the owners of the nightclub, and they’re important DJs in the zones.

Not-Poison watches them for a few moments, a tension settling over the three of them as they keep their guns trained on each other. Not-Poison was programmed to kill. Why aren’t they killing?

The Witch watches from a distance as the three of them simply stand there. Confusion begins to etch itself on the women’s faces, and they repositioned themselves a couple of times, shuffling their weight, waiting for not-Poison to move.

“Well,” one of them drawls. “Are you going to shoot us up or not?”

“You don’t look so well?” The other notices. Her eyes on on their hands, which are shaking, slightly. There’s a pit in their stomach, something painful, as the smell of ash and char clog their nose, as screaming replaces the bass beat that had the roof shaking as hard as their hands. 

“Come on already,” one of them growls. “I’m not here to play games with you.”

“Hey, wait.” The shorter girl lowers her gun, and the taller woman hisses at her. “Hey, are you alright? What’s the problem?”

Not-Poison doesn’t say a word, just stares at them. The Witch feels something akin to hope blossoming in Her chest as She watches them, as not-Poison only stares them down, as they struggle to keep the gun upright.

The shorter woman moves closer, inching forward like she’s trying to help a scared animal. And not-Poison is a scared and cornered animal in that moment, suddenly becoming aware of what they’re doing. They’re trying to execute these people, and they don’t even know why. These people, who are asking them questions, who are trying to understand and help even though they have a gun pointed at their heads.

And then the shorter girl makes a fatal mistake.

She reaches over and sets a hand over theirs, right on the blaster. “You’re afraid.”

The sensation of touch sends their skin crawling. It’s a reflex, nothing more, a thoughtless movement of muscles. Not-Poison squeezes the trigger without a single thought in their head, and the shorter girl falls to the ground, not a single sound escaping her lips, her kind eyes widening as her last breath escapes her lips before she hits the cracked tiled floor.

“Newsagogo!” the taller woman screams, and she lunges at not-Poison, her blaster aimed right as their face. 

She pulls a few shots, and they don’t do much damage except nick them. Their mask comes crumbling off their face, and the woman falters, the gun falling out of her hand as not-Poison’s mask falls off their face. 

“Party-”

Not-Poison shoots her straight between the eyes, and she falls to the ground next to her pink gun. Not-Poion’s breaths are heaving as they stare at the corpses, as they stare at the two women, and not-Poison suddenly becomes aware that they’re murdering people. Those two women were people, were humans, who were terrified and afraid for their lives and yet they still tried to talk to them.

Not-Poison responds to this situation in the only way they know how. Violence.

Not-Poison turns on their heels towards the group of Dracs closest to them. Nearly all of the civilians have been slaughtered, and there’s a couple trying to make their escape. Not-Poison cocks their gun and begins to fire, round after round, into the sea of white.

Dracs collapse to the ground in a near domino effect. The rest that are still standing turn their attention from the escaping killjoys to their commander, clealry confusesd by the change of plans, and not-Poison continues to fire, again and again and again.

Electricity crescendos, then fades into static. The screams have silenced. The only sound is a record spinning, skipping beats. Not-Poison breathes heavily as they stare at the bodies surrounding their feet.

Well, they’re certainly not going to Battery City.

They sprint out of the night club and they break into a BLi van that they had rode in. They turn the keys and let the motor roar before they peel out, and they drive for hours on end until the van dies in the middle of zone seven.

“Well, my favourite little dust bunnies,” A smooth voice echoes from the radio. Dr. Death Defying. “It seems like a snowstorm has just swept through the light that draws in all the drunk moths. Out on Route 666, the nightclub Bullets has just been raided by a group of Dracs, lead by one exterminator. There appears to have been few survivors. Our favourite demolition lovers, Newsagogo and Hot Chimp, are reported as amongst the slain. I suppose any of you Neon Angels are going to have to find a new place to feel your attraction to demolition in. This is Dr. Death Defying, signing off.”

Not-Poison slips out of the car. With stars twinkling overhead, not-Poison walks and walks and walks.

The Witch trails after them.

-

Not-Party Poison collapsed a day later in the sands of zone six, completely fried.

Two kids manage to stumble upon their body while searching for some fashion accessories. They try to loot their body, but when not-Poison suddenly lurches up and tries to swat at them, the two kids start screaming.

“Holy shit!” one of them cries. “That thing’s still alive?”

Not-Party Poison leans on their elbow’s, glaring at the one with turqoise hair. The one with orange hair stares thoughtfully at Not-Poison. “Hey, you don’t look so good. Do you got a gang to get back to?”

“No.”

“Huh. Wanna join us?” They offer their hand to Not-Poison. “My name’s Vamos.”

“I’m Vaya!” The kid with turquoise hair announces.

“Wanna join us?”

Not-Poison stares at Vamos’s hand. It’s silent for a while, before Not-Poison accepts it. “Thanks.”

-

Not-Poison sticks around with the twins, clearly disdained at having to stick with them, but having nowhere else to go. The twins are in good humour with them, though, and they’re happy to chastise not-Poison whenever they’re too grumpy. Not-Poison won’t admit it, but they develop a small soft spot for the two twenty year olds.

They play twenty questions with not-Poison, trying to learn as much as they can about them. But not-Poison isn’t very forthcoming on any details, too paranoid to reveal anything about themselves that could reveal them as an ex-exterminator.

“Okay,” Vaya states, annoyed. “You’re not even going to tell us your age?”

Truth be told, not-Poison doesn’t even know it.

“Fine.” Vaya lets their eyes sweep over not-Poison, analysing them. Vamos watches with little care, shoveling some expired peaches down their throat. “Hm. Okay, I’m gonna say you’re twenty five.”

It’s not true. But not-Poison has aged well, since the pills they’ve been taking also help fight off aging. The Director wants their pretty little toy to stay pretty. Youth is all the rage in the city, after all. Not-Poison doesn’t look a day older than when they were captured.

Not-Poison shrugs. “Sure.”

“We need a name for you,” Vamos moans. “I can’t keep calling you hot dude in my head. Don’t you got a name we could use for you?”

Vaya hums. “Hey, you know, you kind of look like Party Poison.”

Vamos scoffs. “Oh please, I don’t see it.”

“Come on, think about those posters we had as kids. The action figure! Come on.” Vaya puts up their hands and frames not-Poison’s face. “Don’t you see it?”

“Don’t call me Party Poison,” not-Poison simply warns. “I’m nothing like them.”

Vamos holds their head high at that, smug. “See? Besides, you look more like Kobra Kid, anyway.”

Vaya rolls their eyes. “Fine. Fine, but seriously, we need a name for you. Whatcha wanna be called?”

Not-Poison frowns. They glance at the box of hair dye in their hands. Hours earlier, they had gone on a “supply run” (they really just stole from Tommy Chow Mein’s shop while he was busy cursing out someone with a purple mohawk). For some reason, at that moment, the white hair dye had called out to them. Valentine White.

“Call me Val,” they finally settled on.

Vamos and Vaya don’t notice the name on the box. Vamos perks up at the name and drapes themself over Val, who appears extremely chuffed at the action. “Val! Finally, a fucking name. Okay, Val, it’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Val,” Vaya repeats, tasting the name. “That’s a good fit for you. It’s got rough edges to it.”

Val throws the box of hair dye in their face, and Vamos bursts out laughing.

-

They spend the next year working together, just the three of them. They dumpster dive and they steal and they lie, beg, cheat, and murder, just a couple of times. The twins’ blase apathy towards murder and picking fights don’t help Val’s violent streak.

Val eventually gets a full killjoy name- Val Velocity, for how fast they are on their feet and with a gun. Val takes it, because it’s kind of nice to be given something by people that almost feel akin to friends. Of course, Val doesn’t actually see them as friends, just a means to becoming a killjoy, nevermind the fact that they could leave them in the dust whenever they want.

Val experiments.

Val becomes a “he”. Vamos and Vaya embrace his interest in gender identities, but Val is quickly overwhelmed and decideds to stick to something simple. Him.

As time progresses, the Witch watches Party Poison develop into an entirely new character. Everything that was Party Poison about him is slowly getting erased- this is no longer the person She fell in love with, this is a phantom wearing the face of a dead, dead man.

It hurts to think about it. To realise the truth, that in the end, the Witch still managed to kill off the Fabulous Killjoys despite the fact that they’re all still breathing.

-

Val Velocity is becoming restless. He sees people mourning the Fabulous Killjoys, hears stories of their grandeur and heroics. He listens to Dr. D spout this cleanly wrapped tale of four teenagers going on a suicide mission to save a little girl.

Val listens to every word ever uttered about the Fabulous Killjoys. Perhaps its subconscious, perhaps it’s because in another life he had been a part of the Fabulous Killjoys, but Val Velociy does his damnedest to learn everything he can about them. They’re the supposed heroes everyone looks up to, and the more Val looks into it, the more he can’t fucking stand them.

The Fabulous Killjoys. Nothing more than a band of idealistic teenagers who wasted their lives for a girl who doesn’t even matter.

The more Val learns, the angrier he becomes. The people believe that little girl to be some saviour, and those killjoys died believing that. It enrages Val, the idea of dying for something you have no proof of, for wasting your life for something so meaningless.

Val would never give up this newly found freedom for some small child. Val doesn’t care if she’s fucking Jesus- there’s no evidence to her importance. What can a little girl do?

The Witch watches from the sidelines as hatred festers beneath Val’s skin. He’s becoming a bitter, bitter person the more he hears about the legendary killjoys. It’s sickening, to watch Val develop a disdain to the very cause he had tried to die for. It’s sickning to watch Val become the very antithesis to Party Poison, the valent killjoy who wanted nothing in this word but to be a good person and to keep the Girl safe.

Val doesn’t care about being a good person. Val cares about being “the good guy”. Val cares about not being the villain of the story, about being the hero. He doesn’t give two shits if what he’s doing is wrong, because frankly, he doesn’t have the morals instilled in him to figure out if what he’s doing is fucked up or not.

She can’t believe Her eyes, watching Val Velocity become the very thing Poison would loathe.

And it’s all Her fucking fault.

She constructed their character, created an entire story revolving around redemption and growth, only to throw it away. She gave them what could have been the perfect way to go out- Party Poison had changed into someone good, just as they always wanted. They could have died as that person, that person who did terrible things but tried to atone, tried to be better, tried to change their nature and the cruelty they were taught from such a young age.

Instead, She tears that away. She destroys every inkling of the hero who didn’t start out as one, the hero who grew into the title, who earned it. She turns them into Val Velocity, and She inadvertently repeats history, only creating a horrific mockery of Her lover.

Val Velocity became an exterminator, then escaped. It’s a cruel imitation of a past Party Poison already survived, it’s a horrible mockery of their erased history. But She didn’t know this would happen, know that everything would repeat. She didn’t know he would be forced into the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W program, know he would eventually break free and find his way into the desert. She didn’t know everything would happen all over again, except this time, everything changes for the worst.

Because there’s a key difference this time, during the creation of Val Velocity.

He never meets Jet Star.

He never meets Jet Star, who teaches him kindness towards other people. He never meets Fun Ghoul, who teaches him how to have fun. He never meets Kobra Kid, who teaches him how to control his temper. He never meets them, doesn’t have any sort of replacement figures in his life to show him his way towards a redemption. 

Vamos and Vaya don’t have the same morals as the Fabulous Killjoys. The twins are only dead set on surviving, and they don’t give a damn how. They’ll lie, cheat, beg, steal, and kill if they have to just to see another day. They’re vain and arrogant and they can’t fight but that doesn’t stop them from remaining a not so great influence on Val Velocity, who only just escaped from a world of violence, a world of kill or be killed.

Val Velocity is a soldier, just like Party Poison once, long ago. But when Val escaped into the desert, Val did so with violence, slaughtering dozens of people to get a taste of freedom. And Val will continue to kill, friend or foe, so long as he can keep his freedom.

Val doesn’t have Party Poison’s morals, doesn’t have the desire to become a good person. Val doesn’t have people in his life to guide him into making the right choices, doesn’t have people to help him with his ungodly bloodlust. Val Velocity was an empty shell filled to the brim with the need for violence, and there’s no one in this desert to help them.

Poison had Jet Star and Kobra Kid and Fun Ghoul and Dr. Death Defying and the fellow DJs to teach them. Val has no one but Vamos and Vaya and the skin on his teeth. Val has no one but himself to trust when BLi is out there to kill him after his stunt, Val has no one to teach him what it means to be a hero.

The beautiful character arc Party Poison received rusts. Val Velocity destroys all of Party Poison’s hard work.

The Witch destroyed everything that made up Party Poison. By letting Poison stay alive, She’s allowed them to become so fucking corroded they wouldn’t even recognise themself in a mirror.

-

As time grows, Val only seems to get angrier.

He’s fucking pissed. He’s pissed over how the people treat the Fabulous Killjoys, as legends everyone should aspire to be. He’s pissed that this war against BLi is going absolutely nowhere. He’s pissed at Dr. Death Defying and Cherri Cola’s more “pacifistic” route of rebellion. He’s pissed that no one’s changing the world.

Val is pissed, and if no one is going to actually change the world, then Val will do it himself.

He starts the Ultra V’s. Vamos and Vaya remain by his side, if only because they have nowhere else to go. Val spits fire at any one who will listen, happily yells to people about the failings of the Fabulous Killjoys. Not many people will listen, but there’s a couple who do.

Vinyl joins after a marketplace raid. Val happened to shoot a Drac that was about to shoot Vinyl. He doesn’t say much, but he sticks by Val’s side and nods along to everything he says, a silent yes man.

Volume joins a few months later. He’s interested in what Val has to say, in the idea that perhaps the Fabulous Killjoys aren’t really heroes. 

The Ultra V’s begin to seek out firefights. They roam the desert hoping to get in a fight, to prove themselves against BLi, to become a threat. They take down a few Drac patrols, and on occasion they manage to rile up Korse, who in his end years, isn’t as murderous as he used to be, now that he’s developed a quiet relationship with his hairdresser.

It’s a life filled with violence and murder and blood and action. Val can finally let loose as much as he wants, and he does. He tears into Dracs like there’s no tomorrow, and he’s not afraid to fight viciously. 

The Ultra V’s are just a thorn in BLi’s side, but it’s enough, for now.

-

Eight years after the Fabulous Killjoys had died, Kobra Kid escapes into the desert.

The juvie halls were desperate to push him back into the desert. They wanted him to reunite with his peers, with the people he actually belongs with. The problem is, the Youngblood’s have long ago dropped out of contact with Dr. D and the radio heads, and they don’t know how to inform him that Kobra is still alive.

Kobra doesn’t want to go, if he’s honest. He’d made a new life with new friends, and he’s heard terrible stories of the desert. He has a few memories of his life as the venomous Kobra Kid, but it’s not enough to compel him to leave.

Until the Youngblood’s get a tip on where the Girl is.

Kobra Kid might have his memories scrambled, but he knows who he is. He used to be the Kobra Kid, and he has a few memories of the Girl, the little kid he used to call a sister. If Kobra has been willing to die for her, then maybe this new Kobra ought to reunite with her and see what the big deal about her was.

There’s murals in the subway system of a saviour coming to rescue them all from BLi. It’s a prophecy written on the subway walls, and most of the juvie halls believe it to be true. The droids in the Lobby believe the hero to be Destroya, but the juvie halls and killjoys have attached this saviour title to the Girl the Fabulous Killjoys dies trying to save.

After all, why else would they die for some random child?

The Youngbloods manage to sneak Kobra Kid out of the city, but they don’t go with him. They belong in the streets with their peers, they have lives that they need to get back to. So Kobra enters the desert alone, although the Witch keeps an eye on him when She’s not busy with his awful brother.

Kobra Kid tries to go to the old radio shack that used to be Dr. Death Defying’s base when he was “alive”, but nothing’s there except for some ancient blood and white sheets. And Kobra Kid has no way of getting in contact with Dr. D, not a radio to his name.

Kobra Kid wanders the desert, hoping one day, he’ll figure out where he belongs.

-

The Girl has been travelling across the desert this entire time, too. She hasn’t met Val since he was an exterminator, trying her damnedest to keep to the sidelines. She doesn’t want to be the main character, she doesn’t want the story to revolve around her.

She sticks to the shadows and avoids crowds as much as she can. She veers away from parties and concerts, especially considering the last time she crashed a party, so did a crew of Dracs and an exterminator. She keeps to herself, trying to remain as small as possible.

She frequents Tommy Chow Mein despite herself. She needs supplies, and besides, the man has become something of her sole confidant. He’s not a good man, far from it, and the Witch knows that if a heaven or hell exists, he certainly would be headed straight toward hell. But he is kind to the Girl, who has seen so fucking much in so little time, and he doesn’t pity her, which is all that she asks for.

She happens to appear at the shop at the same time as the Ultra V’s.

The Witch watches as two storylines converge.

The Girl finds a yellow mask, and recognises it instantly. Two kids with bright hair are up at the counter, annoying Tommy while she examines the treasure she’s found. It looks like the real deal. Ever since Party Poison died, BLi has been reproducing their mask as child novelties to use in games like cops and killjoys. No one likes playing the killjoys.

But this mask… She grips it tight. She heads towards the counter.

“Will that be all?” Tommy asks, leaning on the counter, his eyes closed, clearly annoyed by the twins, who are messing around with other masks. “I’ve got a vintage of SHINY back here- it’s got all the hot bots for cold nights..”

“No, just the food…” She hesitates, then glances at the mask. “Hey… where’d you get this…?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably off a corpse, maybe a transaction. I’m not really sure, but.. It can be yours for what you have in the bag.”

She sighs. “I’ll take it instead.” The cat on her shoulders huffs, and she gives it a small scratch. “Don’t worry, we’ll get something to eat. I promise.” The question is, what?

She tries to leave the store, but she hasn’t gotten very far when she bumps into someone tall and intimidating. The twins from the store have caught up to her now, and they’re bickering a bit before they refocus on her. 

“I knew it!” Vaya cries. I had your action figure!”

“The girl who rode with the real killjoys. You must have been what, six?”

“Hey, Val, come have a look!”

They’re chittering now, about how much they adored the Fabulous Killjoys. It feels strange, to realise that her siblings had been mass produced. It feels wrong.

Suddenly, Vamos focuses on her hand. “Holy crap! Is that Poison’s mask? Like the real one?”

“Ugh!” Vaya bemoans. “How did we miss that? You know how many carbons that thing is worth?”

Val inspects the child, but he clearly isn’t as impressed with her as his peers. “But you didn’t just ride with them. They were protecting you. They thought you were some kind of messiah, didn’t they? That you're gonna save us all.”

He scoffs. “Newsflash, sweetie. Jesus didn’t save the world. He left it. And these “friends” that were protecting you… how did it feel to watch them die? You aren’t a-”

“Dracs!”

Volume is sprinting as fast as he can towards them, and the Witch almost breathes in relief. It’s fucking awful watching Val interact with the Girl, knowing Party Poison would beat the shit out of him if they could. 

The Ultra V’s go running towards the fight after Val swipes Party Poison’s mask from the Girl. They run straight towards the group of Dracs, who’ve surrounded a young couple. They’re chattering to the civilians and it looks like one of them has already been Draced. The Witch sighs as a brawl takes place.

It quickly goes down hill.

The Girl tries to act tough, but the Witch knows she hasn’t fought a day in her life. She’s been running her entire life, away from fights, away from everyone. She never sticks around long enough to be of use.

She’s trying to figure out what to do when Volume takes a shot for her. The two of them fall to the ground, and Volume dies right on top of her. Yet another reminder of how she’s bad luck- ten minutes of meeting them, and she’s already caused one of them to die.

Val is shooting down the Dracs that got Volume, and he’s making his way towards the couple. Bloodlust is already taking hold, and he’s ruthless when he shoots into the woman, sending round after round into the Draced woman’s back.

He glances to the side at Volume’s body, away from the man mourning his girlfriend. “Volume’s dead. Wrap him up. Let’s get him home.”

-

The Girl isn’t sure why she’s allowed to follow after the Ultra V’s after that massacre, but Vamos and Vaya pull her along, and she doesn’t have the heart to say no. She follows them to their home, and she awkwardly stands there as everyone else makes themself right at home. 

“God,” she finally states, watching them play some meaningless video game that she doesn’t recognise. “How can you guys sit there and play video games when one of your friends just died?” She’s thinking of that day again, when she was six years old…

“It’s no big deal.” Vaya and Vamos shrug. “Volume’s with the Witch now.”

That much is true. The Witch delivered his soul as soon as Vinyl placed his mask in the nearest mailbox. The kid was barely twenty, and She had simply patted his back. “You did a good job out there, kiddo.” She’s done a lot of lying in Her time as a deity, but not that time.

She guides him towards the unknown, and She prays to any gods above Her that he gets the rest he deserves.

Val sits alone, staring.

“Val doesn’t believe in the Witch,” Vaya gossips. “He doesn’t believe in anything that he can’t shoot.”

The Witch hovers to the side, peering in through the window. He doesn’t believe in Her, because he’s never met Her. She hopes to god they never meet, because She’s not sure how She’s going to act when She finally interacts with this fucked up version of the man She used to love.

There’s a broadcast from Dr. D. Scarecrows are moving to invade the Nest. Because the Girl brings bad luck with her like how clouds bring storms

They move outside, patiently awaiting the tropp of BLi bastards. Val’s itching for a fight though, and the whole time he’s been staring alone, he’s been thinking.

He pulls his gun on the man they saved from those Dracs.

Paranoia is festering within him. Val doesn’t want his secret known, he doesn’t want people to realise exactly what he is. And if this is a spy sent from BLi, then he could easily reveal to every killjoy standing there exactly how much murder Val is drenched in.

He shoots the man with little interrogation, his mind made up.

The Scarecrows arrive too soon for anyone to chastise him. Vamos and Vaya are looking at the corpse disapprovingly, but they don’t care enough to really say something. That’s just Val- sometimes he kills people.

The fight with the Scarecrows isn’t intense, but it is destructive. When they manage to chase the Scarewcrows away, their home’s been completely destroyed, and Val’s temper is reaching it’s limit as he thinks about just how much BLi keeps fucking taking from them.

The Girl is dragged away by Cherri, who watches Val with disdain. Cherri spares the Witch a glance, and while he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t have to. His eyes say everything- he recognises Val, and he’s casting his judgement. It makes the Witch’s anger sputter a bit, considering he had also tried to diverge the Killjoys of their destiny. He has no right to cast judgement.

Val Velocity stands on the head of Destroya, with one simple message. He’s tired of running, tired of chasing down meaningless grunts of BLi. It’s time to bring the fight to BLi.

“It’s time to wake up and infest Bat City like a cancer,” he shouts. He’s burning wih rage, simmering with unbridled anger. “It’s time we took death to their doorstep, to their homes. To the entire city. Let’s pull out those guns and make then sing! It’s time we took the war to them!”

Val isn’t the leader, not in the way Poison was. The people listen to him, the crowded attracted around the ruins of an old god who casts it’s judgement upon the Witch without words or eyes. The people in the desert are desperate for a saviour, and if the prophecy won’t come true, then perhaps its time someone made it come true.

The people listen to Val. They have nothing left to lose.

-

The Girl learns to shoot with Cherri. The Witch knows those lessons won’t go anywhere. It seems everything is still going to work out as She had originally planned, just a lot sooner than anticipated, and with a different inciting incident. At least, that’s what She’s hoping for.

She hovers beside Val Velocity and his little gang as they prepare for war. She’s afraid of what’s going to happen, afraid that a war will be waged and Her peaceful ending that She wrote out years ago with the Girl won’t come to fruition. Knowing Val, it’s unlikely any peace can be made.

She watches as Val pickes up a can of red hair dye from Tommy’s.

It sickens Her, watching him taint the colour red. He’s stealing the colour red from himself, unknowingly. He loathes everything Poison stands for, and loathes being compared to the person he views as a faliure.

It stings, to look at Val and see Poison for the first time in nine fucking years. Because this mess of a peson, this bloodlust enthused violent asshole isn’t the man She loves, isn’t ther person who tried to die for their ideals. Val has no ideals, just ideas, just desires. Val has no morals, just like most people in this fucking desert, and the Witch wonders what Poison would think of temselves if they saw Val.

Val isn’t Poison.

And it fucking hurts to watch him try to destroy his own fucking legacy.

-

The Girl rejoins the Ultra V’s. She wants to avenge her siblings, she wants to get revenge against the system that destroyed everything she loved, that killed her siblings and stole her mother and did untold damage to countless others.

Val isn’t enthused with her reappearence, but doesn’t kick her out. The twins spend their time trying to give her a makeover, but the Girl feels like a clown in all of their suggestions, so when Vamos and Vaya decide to go fuck with Val, she’s almost thankful, until she watches Val shoot at some corpse like it’s a target.

Val invites her to prove her worth, and she hesitantly accepts, until she sees the man move. Val shoots him in the head when the Girl proves to be too cowardly to finish the job. Vamos and Vaya appear queasy, but they don’t say much.

-

The Witch watches over Val, nervous. He’s planning something, slipping away from his cremates in the middle of the night. She knows he’s becoming increasingly unstable as time goes on, as BLi continues to destroy more and more and he feels helpless. 

She trails after him and finds them at a little shack She knows well.

It’s Dr. Death Defying’s home.

Val breaks in with ease, battering himself into the door until it gives way under his weight, His gun is drawn and electricity hums as he charges it up. He’s preparing to kill.

Dr. Death Defying awaits him, casually. He lifts a brow at Val, unperturbed by the stranger in his home. “Hello, Party Poison.”

“Don’t fucking call me that.” Val tilts his head high and snarls at Dr. Death Defying. “I’m nothing like that worthless piece of garbage.”

“My apologies, you go by Val Velocity now, don’t you?” The doctor watches him with narrowed eyes. “My, you’ve changed a lot. I hope the Witch is happy with what She’s done.”

Oh, the Witch wants to fucking strangle that man.

“Stop your fucking chatter, you’re so annoying,” Val moans. “Look, we can cut the bullshit. I know exactly what you are.”

“And yet you don’t even know yourself.”

“Shut the fuck up and listen to me.”

“Why don’t you listen to me? I have quite the story to tell you, if you’re interested. It all starts with this exterminator who breaks away from the city-”

Val crams his gun in Dr. Death Defying’s face. He’s becoming a bit frantic now, a bit manic. “You just proved my fucking point! I know you’re a fucking spy for BLi! You’ve been snitching on me and my friends! You’re just a fucking puppet!”

“Now that’s a new one,” he calmly states. “I’m the puppet here?”

“I know your motivations! You guys, all you BLi bastards, you’re after me and my gang because we plan on raiding the city. You want us snuffed before we cause you any damage. You’re afraid of us and the power we hold!”

“Am I the one who’s afraid?” Dr. D reflects. “Or is it perhaps you?”

“Don’t play your mind games. I know what you are.”

“And you’ve come here to exterminate me.”

Val bristles. “It’s different.”

“Is it? Executing people you don’t like doesn’t sound so different.” Dr. Death Defying shrugs. “You’re just like you were when you were eighteen and you just fled from BLi. You changed, and yet you ended up back where you started.”

“Eighteen-?”

“You’re still just a young man who wants to change the world but doesn’t know how. You’re that eighteen year old who escaped BLi, who didn’t know how to do anything but kill. You’re still that kid, but this time, you never got the help you needed. This time, you want to change the world, but you’re not willing to die for it.”

“Of course not, I’m not fucking stupid like those killjoys-”

“Let me tell you a story-”

“I don’t care-”

“About a kid named Party Poison-”

“I’m nothing like him!”

“And how they became a hero-”

“I am the hero-”

“Despite knowing nothing but murder-”

“That’s not all I know-”

“You are Party Poison, you are that man, and you can change into this despicable sort of person, but at your core, you’re still you. You’re still that fucked up kid who doesn’t know what to do. Let me help you.”

Dr. D places a hand around Val’s wrist.

“I’m not Party Poison!”

It’s a reflex. The sensation of touch makes his skin go crawling, and Val can’t stop himself from squeezing the trigger as tight as he fucking can.

The blast blows Dr. D’s brains out and Val moves away, staring at what he’s done.

“What the-”

The Girl arrives on scene, staring at the sight before her, trying to comprehend. Val remains silent for a moment, staring at the man, before speaking up. “Dr. D was the spy for BLi and the one who led them to the Nest. I figured it out.”

“There isn’t any spy! You’re crazy! He was trying to help us survive out here, he loves us...”

“Grow up, sweetheart. Sit here and sob or come back with me. You can have a home with us, a purpose.”

The Girl points a gun at Val. She’s trying hard not to break down right then and there, because Dr. D might not have been a great man, but he wasn’t a complete piece of shit, and he didn’t deserve being blown to pieces by this bastard. 

“I don’t know why the killjoys wasted their time with you,” he spits. “You aren’t special. You’re just scared and alone. And now you want me to be scared.”

“I want you to run.”

She fires a warning shot, and Val simply blinks at her, unafraid.

“Right. Well, why don’t you just hang and wait to die, then. I’m outta here.”

-

Cherri Cola delivers something of Dr. D’s for the Witch. She finds Dr. Death Defying waiting for Her, and he appears completely unenthusied.

“Are you proud of yourself?” Dr. Death Defying sneers. “Are you happy now?”

“You know damn well I never meant for any of this to happen-”

“But it did, Maya.”

The name leaves a bitter taste in Her mouth. “You have no right to that name.”

“And you have no right to destroy destiny, yet you did. You knew damn well what we had to do. But you couldn’t let go.”

“Can you blame me for being afraid?” The Witch is tired of being the center of this blame, tired of being the villain here. “Can you fucking blame me? I’m sorry that I fell in love, I’m sorry that I didn’t want to watch the love of my life and their friends get their brains blown out when there was a way for me to prevent it! I’m sorry that I’m terrified of having to let them wander into the unknown without me!”

“Love isn’t something to apologise over.”

“Then what do you people want from me? I’m fucking human, okay? I make mistakes! And this one was massive! I hate Val Velocity and everything he stands for! I hate what I’ve done, I hate that I still managed to kill the Fabulous Killjoys! If there’s anyone here who regrets it, it’s fucking me!”

The Phoenix Witch throws down the doctor’s mask. She feels like a petulent child throwing a temper, but She’s just so fucking pissed. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t want to destroy the Fabulous Killjoys. I didn’t want to turn them into this, alright? I never wanted this.”

“I know.”

“Then fucking leave me alone!”

“Guide me towards the afterlife,” Dr. Death Defying orders. “And I will.”

The Witch pulls up Her mask and rubs Her eyes. She… She doesn’t want to do that.

“I hate your fucking guts,” She begins, tiredly. “But I don’t want to lose you, either.”

“I’m already lost, just like the Fabulous Killjoys.” Before She bickers with him, he wraps his hands around Hers. “Except this time, the Killjoys can be saved. But I can’t. You have to let me go. And maybe, you won’t have to let go of the Killjoys.”

“What do you mean?”

“People change, Maya.” Dr. D pats Her cheek. “And sometimes, people don’t.”

“God, I hate that you’re basically the god of riddles.”

“It is a curse to bear knowledge. You’ll just have to figure out what I mean.” Dr. D cracks his knuckles and stretches a bit. “Now, would you be a dear and help this old man cross the road? I’ve got places to be.”

The Witch sighs and picks up Dr. D’s mask. With Her other hand, She quietly entertwines their fingers. “Doc, I am sorry.”

“Party Poison’s the one that shot me, which is technically your fault, but I’m not one to keep grudges.” He winks. “Now, let me go.”

The Witch watches Her old friend for a while. This wasn’t how he was supposed to die, but then again, not much is really going according to plan. She doesn’t have much of a say in this, not this time.

She sighs. “Alright, doc. Tell me a story while we walk.”

Dr. D smiles. “You’ll like this one. It was a dark and stormy night. Party Poison and I…”

-

Kobra Kid finds his way to the sight of Val Velocity and his small army. He’s heard some whispers about a plan to go into the city, but he didn’t expect there to actually be people willing to go through with it.

He hopes the Girl is around, and potentially his other siblings. He doesn’t want them involved in this fight, but he hopes it draws their attention.

-

A firefight bursts out. Val Velocity and his gang are at the epicenter of it all. Of course.

The Girl and Cherri do their best, but Cherri hasn’t picked up a gun in a decade, and the Girl still doesn’t know how to fight. The two of them aren’t much of a match against the surrounding Dracs, and the Witch isn’t surprised when they both go down. This wasn’t in Her original plan, Cherri wasn’t supposed to die for another ten years, but that’s just how life is, She supposes.

It’s daylight when the Witch gets back from Her walk with Dr. D. She finds Her crows surrounding the bodies of killjoys and Dracs alike, and She chases them off, shooing them away from the Girl and Her long time friend. 

“Hey, get away from him!” The crows begin to scatter, and She rolls Her eyes at Cherri’s body. “Poor soul. The first time he picks up a gun in years, he gets gunned down. And it was because of you, you know. He was trying to save you.”

“He did save me. He gave his life to save mine. Oh, Cola…”

“Did he?” She stifled a laugh. 

“What the- am I dead?”

“Not quite. I couldn’t take you away now, anyway. Your journey isn’t over yet. And who knows what would happen if you were to detonate in the afterlife.” She shudders at the thought. Oh, hell will be raised. If Mother War’s parade got disturbed because of Her, the Witch might experience the afterlife sooner than expected. “Come on, let’s walk.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“He’s dead. So yes.” It makes Her think of the first time he had died, back in the Helium wars. He was the second casualty in that war, and when She found him in the afterlife with Her, there was no way She was going to let him stay there. She forced his soul back into his body, and some of Her godly powers must have stuck, because he became the god of life. He’s gotten killed a couple times since then, but She’s brought him back every time. She’ll have to wait for his mask to be delivered, though.

“But don’t worry. We have known each other since a long time and a different world ago. I’ll take care of him. Now let’s hurry, there’s a choice you have to make.”

The Witch decides that now is the time to intervene. She’s not really sure what’s going to happen in these next few hours, let alone if any of Her original plans are going to work out, so She might as well give the Girl a taste of who she is. The future is already fucked, so it can’t possibly hurt to try to prepare her.

The Girl isn’t exactly impressed with the Witch, though she listens to every word about her mother. The Witch explains that she’s a bomb, that she has the power to end things or begin them, that she can charge or drain batteries. And if the Witch’s and Destroya’s plans are still a go, then that means Destroya is likely powering up at this very moment. But She doesn’t tell her that.

“I can literally blow up Bat City,” The Girl states. “I can get revenge for all of my friends, my mother, and destroy BLi.”

“Eh, killing is so easy, a germ can do it.” She needs her to think bigger. “You’re better than that. Do me one favour. Look around.”

The Girl glances around at Her advice. “Do you see a difference out there besides the mask one chooses? Maybe the mask stands for a set of beliefs, or a list of orders, whatever it may be. When that mask comes off, what’s there to separate all of us…?”

“You sound like Cola…”

The Witch leaves her, then. She lets her soul guide itself back, and She begins to move. She has a feeling this story is beginning to reach it’s climax. 

-

“Get yourselves together. This was just a warm up for Bat City.”

The Girl arrives on sight, one of Cherri Cola’s swords in hand. There’s a fire in her eyes now, and the Witch watches with pride as she unsheathes her sword. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

The cat happily bounces into the Girl’s arms.

“Sorry about that!” Vaya offers. “We thought you were dead, and your cat looked lonely. Hey, I like the new attitude and hair.”

While the twins chatter, the Girl slips a piece of paper in front of the cat’s eyes. “I’m done hiding.”

-

They march towards Battery City.

Draculoid upon Draculoid awaits them.

The Ultra V’s are ready to fight. Fuck, even Vamos and Vaya have their ray guns raised, and those two can’t fight for shit.

“We surrender,” the Girl states, and Val sputters behind her, because war is the only thing on his mind.

“This is your plan?” Val spits. “Just give up? You really aren’t anything special. I knew you were useless.”

She shakes him off her shoulder. “This is the way it has to be done.”

Well, this next part is easy.

The Witch watches as the Girl takes Her advice, as she does what she’s meant to do. A drac mask is slipped over her head, and the Witch watches as Her plans finally come true. Saving the killjoys didn’t ruin anything, really, except themselves- in fact, it brought about the cleansing of Battery City much sooner than expected.

The Drac mask is on her head.

The Girl does what she was made to do.

-

Boom.

-

Magic is difficult and hard to explain, but everything works out just the way the Witch had hoped for. Every last soul on earth in Battery City, every Draced person, every ghost lingering in the street corners, is finally released from their prisons. The Witch will have a lot of cleaning to do, but for now, She simply watches.

Dracs stumble and falter. Most of them take off their masks, confused. None of them are going to remember any of their time as a Drac, thanks to their soul being in turmoil the entire time. A small blessing, after having your soul ripped to shreds.

Killjoys and Dracs mesh into one group as old friends and families rejoin. Kobra Kid stands on the edge of the fight, searching for the rest of his family. Eight miles away, on the other side of the city, Jet Star is staring up at the sky, wondering why the hell he isn’t dead, and is rubbing the spot he last remembers getting shot at.

On the east side, Ghoul is yanking off his Drac mask and staring at the mop in his hands, wondering what the fuck he was doing and what the hell was in his hands.

Val Velocity remains quiet for a bit, as the Girl tries to gain back some strength. Seeing is believing, and Val finally sees. Magic exists. The Fabulous Killjoys were right. The Girl was worth dying for.

Vamos and Vaya are hugging a few of their old juvie hall friends who had been Draced. Vinyl is smiling at an older brother of his. The Vacation Adventure Society is joking around with some of their old friends. Val simply watches for a few moments, before sucking in a deep breath.

He pulls off his mask and glances down at the Girl. “Here.”

Party Poison’s mask is offered back to the Girl.

“I’m sorry… for everything I’ve done.” For years, Val’s been angry. A simmering rage has been boiling under his skin. The Fabulous Killjoys weren’t heroes, weren’t martyrs- they were nothing but a bunch of fucking fools. Except, they were right.

Val understands that now.

-

Hours later, and the Girl reunites with her mother for the first time since her birth.

The Girl offers up the masks to the mailbox, and the Witch latches on to Poison’s mask.

Cherri is at Her side, smiling. “So it seems everything worked out, hm?”

“I suppose destiny isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” She simply murmurs, cradling the yellow mask in Her claws.

“Did you see Destroya?” Cherri whistled. “I knew that old god had power, but wow, watching it tear apart Battery City… what a light show. I guess everyone’s plan still worked out.”

“Not quite.”

Cherri elbows Her. “Don’t worry. Everyone’s soul has been saved. Which includes Jet Star and Fun Ghoul. Once they get their hands on our pal Party Poison, everything will work itself out. You think either of them are going to be able to tolerate Val Velocity?”

The Witch laughs at that, quietly. “Val’s going to get whipped into shape.”

“Damn right, he will be. Jet Star doesn’t fucking take any shit, and I highly doubt years as a Drac has mellowed any of that.”

“Well, you have a body to be getting back to, don’t you?”

“Actually.” Cherri rejects his mask when She offers it back to him, waving it away. “I think it’s time I take a well, overdue nap. Show Pony, Hot Chimp, Newsagogo, Dr. D- well, there’s a lot of people waiting for me. I want to see them again.”

“You want to leave.”

“I’m not needed.” Cherri shrugs. “A deity of life isn’t necessary when so many people have just gotten their lives back. This is a new era, and I don’t need to be a part of it.”

“We said the same thing about the killjoys.”

Cherri smiles. “Perhaps. But I think this time, I’m right about this.”

The Witch offers Her hand towards Cherri. He takes it. “Come on, little sister. Help your older brother cross the road.”

“You’re older by two days.”

“But I’m still older.” Cherri flashes Her a smile. “Now come on, let’s walk and talk. You’ve got places to be.”

“A lot of other souls to deliver.”

“And, a lot of other souls to look after.” Cherri winks at Her. “Now, how pissed do you think Show Pony is with being the first to have died?”

-

The sun is beginning to dip below the horizon. It’s finally sunset to the longest day ever. The veil between the living and the dead begins to fade, waning like the moon. Finally, She can work.

The Witch checks a few mailboxes, looking to see if anyone has offered Her things to help guide all these new souls. It’s going to be a lot of hard work corralling them into the afterlife without something to guide their souls with.

When She finds Her way to the mailbox in zone one, there’s someone waiting for Her.

“I don’t believe in god,” Val begins, quietly. “But I don’t believe in luck. I know I used to be the enemy, but I’d like to try something new.”

Val glances at Her. And She knows that he can see Her. 

“Did you know… Party Poison…” His voice is soft.

“I did.”

“Am I…”

“I have a story to tell you, if you’re interested.” She hums. “First though, there’s a couple of people you should find first. Jet Star, Kobra Kid, Fun Ghoul- they all lived. I’m pretty sure Kobra Kid just found Fun Ghoul again, and Jet Star is searching for you. And I know they would be more than happy to talk to you.”

Val watches Her, carefully. “Would they…? Because I’m not… you know…”

“No, and you don’t have to be. But I think you could be, if you wanted.”

Val simmers on that a bit, thinking. “They’re still in the city?”

“And they’re waiting for you.”

“Will you still tell me that story?”

“If you’re willing to listen.”

Val sits down next to the mailbox. “I think I have the time.”

Maya sits right next to him. She begins. “It all starts seventeen years ago, when a plucky little exterminator manages to slip right out from under BLi’s noses. It’s the first time that’s ever happened, and, well, you were always one to start trends…”

-

Nothing is perfect. Everything shattered has cracks.

But when the Witch looks into his eyes, She finally sees someone that’s been dead for ten years. Party Poison stares back, listening to every word.

People change. But sometimes, they don’t.

**Author's Note:**

> :(  
> look i’ll come back and edit this later ugh


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